a Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form About Us Dear Writer

Contents Our Staff Welcome 1 Director Amy Margolis (M.F.A., University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) has been with the The Workshop 2 2 The Workshop Festival since 1990, as a graduate assistant, an instructor, Method an assistant director, a co-director and, since 2001, as the 2 Choosing a program’s director. Amy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow in 3 Workshops by Date fiction. She’s taught fiction and nonfiction writing in the 7 Workshops by Festival and to undergraduates at The University of Iowa Instructor and elsewhere. Her short fiction appears in The Iowa Review and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story The Festival Prize for Emerging Writers. She is currently at work on Experience 80 a memoir-in-shards about her life as a dancer in the late 80 Your Day, Weekend, seventies, at the onset of the AIDS crisis. Week: Schedules 81 The Eleventh Hour 81 Goings-On Joanna Eyanson, Program Coordinator, 81 Getting Here 82 Where to Stay graduated in 2018 with a B.A. in English from the University of Northern Iowa, and worked as a writing coach and a Registration bassoonist there. She now lives in Iowa City with a feline Information 84 roommate and moonlights as a writing instructor for the 84 How to Register Parks & Recreation department. This is her fourth year with 84 Fees and Deadlines the Festival. 85 Cancellation & Transfer Policies

Registration Form 86

Cover art by Sayuri Sasaki Hemann About the Cover: Hand-cut paper lettering by Sayuri Sasaki Hemann captured during the magical hour in early 2019; Photos by Tom Langdon and paper connecting the words that grow from our landscape, our space, our time. (Photo by John Svetlana Jovanovic Engelbrecht)

Design by Benson & Hepker On the warm, sunny, third afternoon of 2019, my photographer friend John and I spent the magic Design, Iowa City hour trying to capture the changing golden light through the window of my studio next to Ralston Creek reflected on this cut paper lettering. The light shifted every second, and we kept chasing it until the sun was hidden by the horizon. This image is one of the 90+ images we shot. It captures all that was magical about that hour.

Sayuri Sasaki Hemann is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa. She works seamlessly between many mediums using materials familiar and unfamiliar. Sayuri’s works often explore the themes of one’s relationship to the surrounding environment, and finding self in relation to place, space and time. b Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form About Us Dear Writer

Dear Writer,

Here in Iowa City, we are preparing for the 33rd Iowa Summer Writing Festival. In these pages, you’ll find workshops in the novel, the short story, the novel-in-stories, the essay, the memoir, writing the body, writing the family, writing the Chimera, writing America, writing about nowhere, hybrid forms, flash fiction, short poems, lyric poems, prose poems, spiritual writing, writing romance, writing resistance, writing humor, playwriting, writing picture books, writing for young adults, and writing beyond genre.

We’re breathless with excitement for our 33rd Festival, which features 125 workshops that explore the genres in their reaches.

Since 1987, the Festival has welcomed to the campus of The University of Iowa writers from 18 to 98 years of age, from all 50 states, and from every continent. Most of us come to the workshop table from other areas of expertise, other lives. These include the armed forces, business, diplomacy, education, farming, homemaking, journalism, law, law enforcement, medicine, parenting, pastoral care, the performing arts, social services, and more. We come together across the genres, the generations, and at every level of literary practice in a common enterprise. We come as writers. This is the only assumption we make about you, whether you arrive with the third draft of your novel, a message in a bottle, or merely a bee in your bonnet.

The Festival is proud to belong to Iowa City—a UNESCO City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network. Iowa City has long been a haven for writers, and The University of Iowa our ancestral home. The rich literary legacy that belongs to this place abides today in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Nonfiction Writing Program, the Playwrights Workshop, the International Writing Program, the Spanish Creative Writing Program, the Translation Workshop, the undergraduate Major in English and Creative Writing, The Certificate in Writing, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, The Iowa Youth Writing Project, Between the Lines: The Writing Experience, the Irish Writing Program, the Iowa Center for the Book, The University of Iowa Press, The Iowa Review, and The Examined Life Journal. Some years ago, Iowa City dedicated the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk, which celebrates in bronze relief panels some of the singular voices that have come together here, from Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut to John Irving and James Tate. Everything here is closely observed—now, even the sidewalks.

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is an opportunity for you to share your work in a community that wishes it well. It’s a long conversation we’ve been having in Iowa City.

We invite you to pull up a chair.

Amy Margolis Director

1 Welcome TheThe WorkshopWorkshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Method Choosing a Workshop Workshops by date

The Workshop Method

Courses in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival are primarily based on the workshop method, a studio learning environment where the primary text is your own creative work. Many workshops will also include examination of exemplary published work.

The workshop is a dynamic community that reads, and responds to, what’s brought to it. We approach each work-in-progress on its own terms, in a spirit of critical appreciation for that work’s own intentions. We’re on its side. In workshops devoted to critiquing work, your writing will be read and discussed by your fellow writers, giving you the benefit of a careful, supportive readership. You are expected to give the same considered feedback to others on their work.

Choosing a Workshop

Workshop Format: Some workshops in the Festival are devoted to generating new writing through guided exercises and prompts, some to providing feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in your time here, and some to a combination of both.

Every workshop description in the Festival begins with the genre(s) it invites and ends with a standard statement of the format it will use.

Skill Levels: Most workshops in the Festival are designed with writers across a range of skill levels in mind. They vary, though, in terms of locus in the writing process.

But There Are So Many! How Do I Know Which Workshop Is Right for Me?

When choosing a workshop, resist the temptation to place yourself as a writer. Rather, think about the work you want to focus on in your time here and where that work is in its development.

If you’re working with issues that arise in later drafts, you might look at workshops that explore aspects of revision or structure, or workshops with an emphasis on providing feedback on pages participants bring from home. If you’re starting a new project, or your project has stalled out, or you’re returning to the page after a long silence, or you’re crossing genres, or you’re at your wit’s end deciding, a course that focuses on generating new writing through guided exercises and prompts will give you a boost.

If you find choosing among so many workshops dizzying, you might ask: “What do I want to accomplish in my week/weekend in Iowa City? What do I want to carry home and into my writing next year?”

Your own goals provide the most accurate map to the workshop that’s best for you.

If you get lost in the weeds, call the Festival office at 319-335-4160, and we’ll help you clear a path. You will help us guide you by studying the descriptions and narrowing your selections before we speak.

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Workshops by Date

Weeklong Workshops June 9–14 Mary Allen...... Encounters with Our Lives: Spiritual Writing ...... 9 Kate Aspengren...... Playwrights Workshop ...... 10 Thomas K . Dean...... Shaping the Memoir and Personal Essay ...... 22 Hope Edelman...... The Story beneath Your Story: A Memoir-in-Progress Workshop ...... 26 Hugh Ferrer...... In Convincing Style: Prose Textures, Poetic Effects ...... 31 Vince Gotera...... Wilderness Map: Beginning Poetry Workshop ...... 39 Wayne Johnson...... Novel Solutions ...... 46 Derek Nnuro...... Fire Up: Novel Engines ...... 56 Lon Otto ...... Flash Fictions, Prose Poems, Micro Memoirs ...... 59 Zach Savich ...... Old Poems, New Poems: Revising and Moving Forward ...... 66 Ami Silber...... What Every Fiction Writer Can Learn from Romance Novels ...... 72

Weekend Workshops June 15–16 Thomas K . Dean...... Revising Sentences for Impact ...... 22 Hope Edelman...... Time and Place: What Happened, Where and When ...... 27 Mieke Eerkens...... Experimenting with Form ...... 27 Eric Goodman ...... Write Funny to Me ...... 38 Vince Gotera...... Jazz June: Sound and Writing Poems ...... 39 Sands Hall...... Do I Really Know My Narrator? Strengthening Point of View ...... 40 Christine Hemp ...... The Short-Short Nonfiction Triptych ...... 42 Jim Heynen...... Writing Emotions ...... 43 Zach Savich ...... Enhancing the Essay: Making Memoir Do More ...... 67 Sandra Scofield...... All Those Pages: Talk about Your Novel ...... 69 Ami Silber...... Selling Your Book: Elevator Pitches, Back Cover Copy, and Query Letters ...... 73

Weeklong Workshops June 16–21 Amy Butcher...... Essay Bootcamp: A Generously Generative Workshop ...... 19 Mieke Eerkens...... Picture This: Exploring and Incorporating Images into Our Writing ...... 28 Max Garland...... Familiarizing the Strange/Mystifying the Familiar: A Poetry Workshop ...... 33 Eric Goodman ...... The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel . . . . 38 Sands Hall...... Fiction Strategies for the Memoirist ...... 40 Christine Hemp ...... Belonging: The Geographies of Nonfiction ...... 42 Jim Heynen...... From Memory to Art: Poems, Prose Poems, Short-Short Fiction ...... 43 Wayne Johnson...... Telling the Tale: A Nonfiction Workshop ...... 46 Marc Nieson ...... Writing the Short Story—Love Letters ...... 55 Lon Otto ...... Deep Revision: Fiction & Narrative Nonfiction ...... 59 Sandra Scofield...... Empowering the Novelist: Tools and Techniques to Guide You in a First Draft . . . . . 69 Maxine Swann...... Pygmalion or Bringing Your Characters to Life ...... 77

3 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Date

Weekend Workshops June 22–23 Marilyn Abildskov ...... Trespassing Encouraged: A Generative Workshop for All Genres ...... 7 Jonathan Blum...... Who Is I?: Experiments in Fictional Identity ...... 17 Amy Butcher...... The Literary Memoir ...... 19 Kelly Dwyer...... Writing the Popular Novel (In Any Genre) ...... 24 Mieke Eerkens...... Promptapalooza 2019 ...... 28 Hugh Ferrer...... Clock and Camera: Immersing the Reader ...... 31 Katie Ford...... Draft after Draft: Write a Dozen Poems ...... 32 Allen Gee...... The M .F .A . Application ...... 34 Michael Morse...... Revisionist Singing—Walking Your Poems through the Ages ...... 54 Marc Nieson ...... The Art of Metaphor ...... 55 Lon Otto ...... Writing a Child’s Perspective: Fiction, Memoir, & Poetry ...... 60 Maxine Swann...... Loosen Your Hand ...... 77

Weeklong Workshops June 23–28 Marilyn Abildskov ...... You Are the Subject: The Personal Essay ...... 7 Linda Bendorf...... Your Legacy as Memoir: The Essence of a Life ...... 14 Jonathan Blum...... Short Story Workshop ...... 17 Kelly Dwyer...... Five Elements of the Novel ...... 25 Hugh Ferrer...... Inventing Memory: A Workshop on Imagery ...... 32 Katie Ford...... Advanced Poetry Workshop: Heart, Guts, & Craft ...... 33 Allen Gee...... Writing America ...... 35 Cecile Goding...... Call and Response: A Workshop in Correspondence Writing ...... 35 James McKean...... Memoir: Pieces for the Whole ...... 52 June Melby...... A Hedonistic Week of Creative Indulgence (For Your Muse) ...... 53 Michael Morse...... Think Twice/Think Again—Making Poems from Inspiration & Calculation ...... 54 Sandra Scofield...... Agency, Struggle, and Transformation of Character in the Novel ...... 70

Weekend Workshops July 13–14 Susan Aizenberg...... Working with Imagery: A Generative Poetry Workshop ...... 8 Mary Allen...... Writing from the Heart: A Creative Jumpstart ...... 9 Thomas Fox Averill...... What’s Happening—Plot in Fiction ...... 11 Venise Berry...... Shades of Gray: Sensuality vs . Sex ...... 15 Jennifer Fawcett ...... Writing around the Edges ...... 29 Diana Goetsch...... “Cut These Words and They Bleed”: A Nonfiction Writing Intensive ...... 36 Tricia Park...... The Art of Unbalance ...... 61 Martin Pousson...... Freeze Frame: Writing the Very Short Story ...... 63 Kathleen Rooney...... The Fantastic Mongrel: Getting Started on Prose Poetry ...... 65 Mary Kay Shanley ...... Perspective in Your Memoir ...... 71 Carol Spindel ...... The Overstuffed Closet: A Weekend of Mini-Memoirs ...... 74 Sarah Strickley...... Starting Your Novel ...... 76

4 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Date

Weeklong Workshops July 14–19 Dorothy Barresi...... Identity Poetics: Writing the Self in Politically Charged Times ...... 11 Timothy Bascom...... Formed by Family: Writing about Those Who Shape Us ...... 13 Tameka Cage Conley ...... Time on My Side?: Managing Time and Tension in Fiction ...... 21 Kelly Dwyer...... Plotting the Novel ...... 25 Jennifer Fawcett ...... A Play in a Week: The Building Blocks of Playwriting ...... 29 Diana Goetsch...... Free-Writing Intensive: A Workshop for All Genres ...... 37 Jeremy Jones...... More than Memoir ...... 47 Jude Nutter...... Poetic Alchemy: From First Draft to Final Draft ...... 57 Rachel Pastan...... Experiment, Embellish, Enlarge: Revising Your Way into Story ...... 61 Martin Pousson...... Link Letters: Writing the Novel-in-Stories ...... 64 Suzanne Scanlon...... Make It Strange—A Generative Workshop ...... 67 Carol Spindel ...... Finding Your Threads: Shaping and Structuring Nonfiction ...... 74 Ian Stansel...... Starting (And Finishing) Your Novel ...... 75 Steven Wright...... Beyond Genre: The Art of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, and Horror . . . 79

Weekend Workshops July 20–21 Timothy Bascom...... Writing Inventive (Not Just Creative) Nonfiction ...... 14 Venise Berry...... Writing a Successful Book Proposal ...... 16 Sarah Sadie Busse/ Jacqueline Briggs Martin. . . . Setting the Stage for Wonder: Magic and Mystery in Children’s Picture Books . . . . 18/51 Kelly Dwyer...... Flash Fiction in a Flash: Writing (And Submitting) Publishable Flash Fiction . . . . . 25 Jennifer Fawcett ...... Solo Performance 101 ...... 30 Diana Goetsch...... Five New Poems: A Generative Workshop for All Levels ...... 37 Jeremy Jones...... Writing about Nowhere ...... 47 Margaret LeMay...... Writing Health: A Multi-Genre Generative Weekend ...... 48 BK Loren...... Author as Architect: Radical Revision of Fiction and Nonfiction ...... 49 Jude Nutter...... Walking in the Field of Words: Using the Natural Landscape in Poems ...... 57 Beau O’Reilly ...... Finish the Thing! ...... 58 Rachel Pastan...... Fear and Loathing, and Sometimes Even Joy: Getting Emotion on the Page . . . . . 62 Sarah Strickley...... Nurturing a Daily Writing Practice ...... 76

June 2019 July 2019 S M T W T F S S M T W T F S 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 28 29 30 31 30

5 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Date

Weeklong Workshops July 21–26 Susan Aizenberg...... Writing Alone Together: A Week-Long Retreat for Generating New Poems ...... 8 Nancy K . Barry ...... Revising How You Revise: A Workshop for Nonfiction Writers ...... 12 Robin Hemley...... The Frangible Memoir ...... 41 Charles Holdefer ...... The Balancing Act: Narration, Character and Dialogue in Fiction ...... 44 Naomi Jackson...... This Summer, You Write Your Novel ...... 45 BK Loren...... Word Yoga: Exercises to Invite Your Words to Stretch, Focus, Breathe ...... 49 Sabrina Orah Mark...... Writing the Chimera: A Workshop on Hybrid Forms ...... 50 Malinda McCollum...... Five Day MFA: A Fiction Workshop ...... 51 Beau O’Reilly ...... Writing the Two-Character Play: A Workshop on Making the One-Act ...... 58 Juliet Patterson...... The Art of Description ...... 62 Sarah Saffian...... Advanced Memoir: The Art and Craft of the Personal Essay ...... 65 Suzanne Scanlon...... Writing as Resistance ...... 68 Laurel Snyder...... The Wild Rumpus: A Picture Book Workshop ...... 73 Anthony Varallo...... Get In, Get Out, Go On: A Short Story and Novel Workshop ...... 78

Two-Week Intensive Workshops July 14–26 Amber Dermont...... Novel Manuscript Workshop ...... 23 Sandra Scofield...... Memoir Manuscript Workshop ...... 70

Weekend Workshops July 27–28 Nancy K . Barry ...... Whose Voice Is This?: A Primer on Style ...... 13 Venise Berry...... Muddy Water: Controlling Plot, Subplots, and Plot Points in Your Novel ...... 16 Jennifer Colville...... Imagery for Prose Writers ...... 20 Tameka Cage Conley ...... Poet-ing the Self: Memoir and the Lyric ...... 21 Cecile Goding...... After the Bell: A Workshop for Schoolteachers ...... 36 Margaret LeMay...... Short Forms in Flight: A Multi-Genre Generative Weekend ...... 48 Juliet Patterson...... A Broken Thing: The Poetic Line ...... 63 Sarah Saffian...... So What’s Your (Life) Story? Memoir in a Nutshell ...... 66 Suzanne Scanlon...... Polishing and Publishing Your Short Prose ...... 68 Mary Kay Shanley ...... Smaller Pictures Deliver Bigger, Better Stories ...... 72

6 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Date

Marilyn Abildskov

Marilyn Abildskov (M.F.A., The University of Iowa) is the author of The Men in My Country. She is the recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Writing Residency, and the Utah Arts Council. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, AGNI, Southern Review, Epoch, Best American Essays 2018, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches in the M.F.A. Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Trespassing Encouraged: A Generative Workshop for All Genres Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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In this weekend course, we will look at texts that break rules: essays that read like short stories, short stories that sound like poems, prose poems that make a reader rethink what words like “poem” and “essay” and “story” mean. We will look at texts that play with borrowed forms (recipes, how-to lists, and wedding vows) and texts that push traditional boundaries of time, creating new portals into old subjects. As we read, we will respond to prompts to produce our own work, aiming not to color inside the lines of any particular genre but to find, instead, vitality in ourselves and on the page. We will spend one day reading and drafting and the second day workshopping our newly created, unclassifiable work. By the end of the weekend, participants will glimpse how genre lines can serve as invitations to experiment rather than no-trespassing signs—wide open fields of possibility. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

You Are the Subject: The Personal Essay Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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“Can it be that I am the subject?” the writer Elizabeth Hardwick asks in Sleepless Nights. In this course, the answer is yes. You will be the subject, shaping the raw material of your life onto the page. To do so is

nothing new. Writers throughout the ages have drawn on their lives, some in small measure and some Key to Genres to a greater degree. But often those stories hid behind the veil of “fiction” while “memoir” remained the AG All Genres domain of older men looking back on public lives. Now the genre has cracked wide open, showcasing l lC Children’s diverse and disruptive voices. We will read some of these distinctive writers, absorbing as much as lE Essay possible about structure and style: how to negotiate time; how to withhold and reveal in tandem, creating lF Fiction tension, then releasing it; and how to distill characters in memorable ways. Short published readings will lHF Hybrid Forms inspire participants to produce new work. Workshopping will offer possibilities on how best to revise. At lM Memoir the end of the week, participants will have greater appreciation for elements of craft in generating and lNF Nonfiction refining a personal essay and also a deeper understanding of how revision so often works: that the story we lN Novel set out to tell isn’t always the story that demands to be told. In this workshop we will generate new writing lPW Playwriting through guided exercises and prompts. lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

7 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg is the author of three poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015); Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002); and Peru in Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997). She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them Bosque, The American Journal of Poetry, The James Dickey Review, The North American Review, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Connotation Press, The Journal, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and have been reprinted in several anthologies, most recently Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017 (SFASU Press), and New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press 2017). Aizenberg is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English in the Creighton University M.F.A. and undergraduate creative writing programs. She can be reached through her website at https:// susanaizenberg.wordpress.com.

Working with Imagery: A Generative Poetry Workshop Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Imagery—the recreation of sensory experience through language—is one of the key elements of poetic craft, and surprisingly, frequently among the hardest to master. Most of us are familiar with Pound’s famous dictum, “Go in fear of abstractions,” and of course that old saw, “Show, don’t tell,” yet it can be challenging to put these concepts into practice or to understand why they are so important. It’s certainly true there is a place for the abstract in poetry, but for most poets, the ability to effectively work with imagery is vital to writing our best work. In this generative workshop we’ll focus on the use of imagery in creating and revising poems. We’ll spend our two days together reading and discussing poems in which imagery plays an important role and free-writing together in class in response to proven prompts designed to inspire new work. We’ll share exercises and ideas for new poems in a supportive, no-pressure exchange as a way of discovering their “gifts”—those openings towards revision or new work. Our goal will be to send you home more confident in your understanding and use of imagery, energized, and filled with ideas for new poems and revisions. The workshop welcomes poets at all levels of experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Writing Alone Together: A Weeklong Retreat for Generating New Poems Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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We all know that writing poems is a solitary activity, but it’s often exhilarating and useful to generate work toward new poems by responding to “no-fault” prompts and exercises together in a supportive and energizing group of fellow poets. We’ll spend our week doing just that: free-writing together in class in response to proven prompts designed to inspire new poems or new ideas for poems on which we’ve been working. We’ll share exercises in a supportive and no-pressure exchange as a way of discovering the

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possibilities for development in what we’ve done. We’ll also be reading and discussing the work of other poets for inspiration and models. Our goal will be to spend the week in pleasurable, creative activity and to send you home inspired, with exciting drafts and ideas for new work. The workshop welcomes poets at all levels of experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Mary Allen

Mary Allen is the author of a literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books. Her second book-length memoir, Awake in the Dream House, was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. She received an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught in the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City and is a full-time writing coach.

Encounters with Our Lives: Spiritual Writing Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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As anyone who has engaged with writing in any serious way knows, writing itself is essentially a spiritual endeavor. In order to write well it’s necessary to tap into the flow of spiritual energy inside each of us, whether we call that energy creativity or inspiration or something else. In this class, we’ll generate new work in an energizing, strictly positive environment, using prompts and in-class writing to explore the places in our lives where the moments and details intersect with meaning. We’ll use my easy, foolproof method for tapping into the inner wellspring from which all good writing comes. And we’ll spend time working on editing the writing we get, using spiritual skills such as listening to intuition and briefly dropping down into the silence beyond thought, to create the best finished writing possible. Together we’ll create a small, close-knit community that fosters creativity, engenders fresh material and new ideas, and results in writing that glows from within. This class will be useful for anyone writing essays, a memoir, or a spiritual autobiography; for anyone struggling with editing or perfectionism; and for anyone who’s just getting started or trying to locate their true material. The class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts. Key to Genres

lAG All Genres lC Children’s Writing from the Heart: A Creative Jumpstart lE Essay Weekend Workshop July 13-14 lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms E M NF l l l lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction Have you always felt a deep urge to write but not known how or where to begin? Do you long to get at the lN Novel meaning and stories inside of you but feel frustrated when you sit down and try to make it happen on the lPW Playwriting page? If so, this class is for you. We’ll use a variety of prompts and easy, fun, foolproof writing exercises to lP Poetry generate writing that’s fresh, exciting, and surprising—writing that arises from the true spring of creativity lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Mary Allen inside us all. We’ll also discuss issues of craft, such as creating scenes and using specific concrete details, (continued) and talk about where students can go from here. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Kate Aspengren

Kate Aspengren (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop) has taught writing at The University of Iowa, Coe College, Grinnell College, and Cornell College. Her plays include Flyer, Rule of Nines, Our Lady of Route 52, and The Ballad of Cowgirl Christy. Her work has been published by Samuel French, Inc., produced throughout the United States and Canada, and translated for international production. She holds an annual writing residency at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Delaware, where her adaptation of Madeleine L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time was produced. Kate’s middle-grade novel, Ashley Templeton is Ruining My Life, was recently published by Foreverland Press.

Playwrights Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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This workshop is for playwrights who have a play at some stage of development. The writing we do as playwrights is intended primarily for the ear, so it’s essential to hear our work read in order to see if we’ve achieved what we intended. We’ll read excerpts aloud from each play and give thoughtful, specific feedback to the playwright. The goal is to hear what you’ve written and use that for further revision. As time permits, there will also be overnight and in-class writing to help illuminate work-in-progress and/ or to generate new writing. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Thomas Fox Averill

An O. Henry Award short story writer, Thomas Fox Averill is Professor Emeritus of English at Washburn University, where he taught creative writing for 37 years. He has published two story collections, two works of nonfiction, and five novels. His most recent book, Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in February of 2018, and is made up entirely of fictional diaries, letters, drawings, and other documents that tell the story of an unconventional 19th- century woman who makes important fossil discoveries as an amateur scientist.

10 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

What’s Happening—Plot in Fiction Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Plots in stories and novels take many twists and turns, as do the plots of our lives. Our weekend will include discussion of plot strategies, the various kinds of plots, the use of subplots, and how our plots create meaning. The plot of the weekend: scene one, discussion; scene two, writing a series of exercises designed to help understand plot in its many forms; scene three, sharing writing; and scene four, problem solving and insightful conclusions. This generative class is open to fiction and would-be fiction writers at all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Dorothy Barresi

Dorothy Barresi is the author of five books of poetry: What We Did While We Made More Guns (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); American Fanatics; Rouge Pulp; The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of an American Book Award; and All of the Above, winner of the Barnard College New Women Poet’s Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Emily Clark Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays on contemporary poetry have appeared regularly in The Gettysburg Review, and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals including Hotel Amerika, Conduit, American Journal of Poetry, Chaparral, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Volt, Pool, and New Ohio Review. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge, and lives in Los Angeles.

Identity Poetics: Writing the Self in Politically Charged Times Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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One of the most exciting, crucial currents in poetry today is the ascendancy of identity poetics: that is, poems that explore, in boundless ways, a speaker’s individual self as a political site, diversely inhabited, Key to Genres self-mapped, and always moving toward discovery. In this workshop, built on mutual respect and the lAG All Genres belief that each of us owns our unique story, “political” is not a term of party allegiances in turbulent lC Children’s times; rather, it is an inclusive term acknowledging that all poems arise out of their particular cultural lE Essay and historical moment. The goals for this workshop, then, are for each participant to write 4-5 new lF Fiction poems that implicitly or explicitly situate the “personal” experience of self (real and/or imagined) against lHF Hybrid Forms a public backdrop of profound American change; to investigate how formal invention, particularly lM Memoir self-interruption and interrogation, can keep a poem from calcifying into fixed ideas; to learn revision lNF Nonfiction strategies that break a stalled-out draft wide open, inviting real revelations for writer and reader; finally, lN Novel to discuss what it means to write poetry in this post-subtle era of bluster and cant. Ultimately, participants lPW Playwriting will write complex, unruly poems that move well beyond autobiography toward the possibility of lP Poetry community, poems that begin to register what it means to be a citizen of the 21st century. Assigned lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Dorothy Barresi reading will include a diverse list of poems by Sax, Akbar, Lockwood, McCrae, Ford, Vuong, Conoley, Xie, (continued) Long Soldier, etc. Exercises will be given to jump-start poems from a variety of access points. In addition to our daily workshop session critiquing newly generated poems, the week will also include one-on- one conferences with me. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Nancy K. Barry

Nancy K. Barry (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is a playwright and essayist who teaches creative nonfiction writing at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Iowa Woman, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun. Her one-woman show, Lessons from Cancer College, details a year spent as a teacher undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She has been the host of a radio show on writing (“The Naked Page”) and a podcast, “Writing Out Loud.”

Revising How You Revise: A Workshop for Nonfiction Writers Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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We all know that revision is the deepest level of “work” that we do on any piece of writing we compose, but not all writers have a system in place for what to actually DO once they set themselves to the task. By listening carefully to what the draft is saying, and by applying some specific criteria to handling a manuscript in different stages, writers can begin to be more systematic, and less vulnerable, to the enduring and sometimes maddening work of revision. This workshop is intended to help any writer who is “stuck” on what, how, and when to revise a memoir, essay, or creative nonfiction piece. We will spend our days engaging in exercises on types of revision practice, as well as manuscript review designed to generate useful feedback to help writers feel less at sea with a piece that needs revision. Participants will bring either a short or long piece of nonfiction that they know needs revision or “re-seeing,” and through a series of exercises and in-class manuscript review, we will discuss how to be systematic at revising that work. Writers of all levels and expertise are welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

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Whose Voice Is This?: A Primer on Style Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Most writers and readers will tell you that to have an engaging style, we need to capture the sound of a “real person speaking.” Yet, it is equally true that good prose is not merely “writing down what people say.” How do we navigate getting the sound and resonance of our “style” down on the page, and how would we even begin to describe the sound we’re trying to achieve? This workshop provides a two-day entry into defining and manipulating prose styles. We will begin with short prose passages from writers with very distinctive styles, to learn what we can about how words and sentence structure create the sound of an author’s voice and style on the page. Then we will engage in several exercises to directly impose or manipulate style on a topic we wish to write about. By the end of the weekend, we may not be “masters of style,” but we will understand in much more concrete terms what determines the sound, authenticity, and power of prose style in writing. Writers of all levels are welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Timothy Bascom

Tim Bascom is the author of the memoir Running to the Fire (University of Iowa Press, 2015), which is about coming of age as the son of missionaries in Ethiopia during a Marxist Revolution. His earlier memoir, Chameleon Days (Houghton Mifflin), won the Bakeless Literary Prize. He is also the author of a collection of essays and a novel. His writing has won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review and been anthologized in Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. Bascom, who received his M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, is Director of Creative Writing at Waldorf University.

Formed by Family: Writing about Those Who Shape Us Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

lE lF lM lNF Key to Genres When we write memoirs or personal essays, we inevitably find ourselves depicting those who have had the lAG All Genres most influence in our lives—our family members. To understand the self, we must understand them. Take lC Children’s a look at a shelf of memoirs, and you will see just how vital those relationships are—in Vivian Gornick’s lE Essay Fierce Attachments or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception or Michael lF Fiction Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. However, writing about family is risky, and there are legendary stories lHF Hybrid Forms of family members who stopped talking after a memoir was published. As a result, we don’t want to get lM Memoir it wrong. In this workshop, we will practice ways to write more freely and honestly while still honoring lNF Nonfiction those we care about. We will discuss how other authors have handled writing about mothers, fathers, lN Novel spouses, and children, and we will generate new stories, getting feedback on how we portray the central lPW Playwriting relationships. The class welcomes nonfiction writers as well as fiction writers who are trying to decide lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Timothy Bascom whether to “tell it like it is.” If you are developing a longer manuscript, bring it along. There will be time (continued) for sharing. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Writing Inventive (Not Just Creative) Nonfiction Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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To borrow from an over-used advertising pitch, “Are you tired of the same old essays? Ready to try something new?” If so, come spend a weekend experimenting. We will read and write only the most inventive nonfiction—essays pretending to be poems, essays that stray into the fiction room, collage essays, essays that (like hermit crabs) borrow their homes, even essays that are pure imaginative speculation. (Yes, that counts. What we imagine is a fact, too!) This is a workshop for those who have been writing creative nonfiction for a while but want to stretch. We will read from a sampling of experimental essays by authors such as John McPhee, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, and David Foster Wallace. Participants will be encouraged to generate several new short drafts, receiving feedback at least twice in a workshop fashion. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Linda Bendorf

Linda M. Bendorf (M.A.T., J.D., The University of Iowa) is an award-winning instructor and writing coach who has inspired both novice and seasoned writers in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for more than two decades. Linda’s recent essay, “Quest for the Rufous-Capped Warbler,” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest. The essay reveals how intuition and hard work help us to find the magic…in birding and writing! Linda is director of Blue Sage Writing, which offers workshops, one-on-one coaching, manuscript editing, and private writing retreats in Boulder, Colorado. Linda’s essays, features, and poetry have also appeared in the Chicago Tribune Media Group’s Triblocal, The University of Iowa’s The Daily Palette, USA Today, Gannett News Service Wire, Des Moines Register, Instructor, The Iowan, and Gather Magazine. Linda and her husband, Carl, live on Colorado’s Front Range where they hike, bird, bike and marvel at the ever-changing sunsets over the Rockies.

Your Legacy as Memoir: The Essence of a Life Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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Come write the stories of your legacy. Some call it the story of your soul. Like memoir writing, legacy writing chronicles your most profound, defining moments and milestones (some joyful, others painful), those that inform and perhaps inspire future generations. Unearth your personal stories. Your narratives. What do you value? What did your ancestors value? Figuratively speaking, what garden did you plant? What did you stand up for? Whom did you touch? Who most inspired you? What mark—or footprint—do

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you hope to leave? U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas captured what it means to leave our mark when he said, “We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.” While you might cherish your great-grandmother’s gold locket and walnut armoire, a written legacy might well be the crown jewel of all bequests. This workshop is designed for writers of all levels who long to spend a week developing your most significant stories through focused, engaging work, including writing prompts, selected readings, and in-class discussion. What could be worth more? In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Venise Berry

Venise Berry is the author of three national bestselling novels: So Good, An African American Love Story (1996); All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (2000); and Colored Sugar Water (2002). Her memoir Driven: love, career and the pursuit of happiness recently released in 2018. She is currently finishing her fourth novel, Pockets of Sanity. Berry has co-edited two anthologies, Black Culture & Experience: Contemporary Issues (2015) and Mediated Messages and African American Culture: Contemporary Issues (1996). She is also the co-author of two nonfiction film books, The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2015 & 2007) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel 2001). Her numerous short stories, journal articles, and book chapters appear widely in creative and academic circles. Berry is an associate professor of Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She is also a fiction faculty member in the Solstice Low-Residency Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. Visit Venise online at www.veniseberry.com.

Shades of Gray: Sensuality vs. Sex Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Sensual writing can be just as powerful, if not more powerful, than sexual writing. What is the difference between a sensual love scene and a sexual love scene? How do writers convey passion, emotion, and love without using explicit language? This workshop offers participants an opportunity to develop an Key to Genres

important skill in fiction writing. Exercises will explore how to effectively use metaphor, imagination, lAG All Genres and narrative silence as alternatives to overt wording and erotic physical description to write about love. lC Children’s Experimenting with elements like color, food, music, seasons, environment, and more, you will discover lE Essay how to create powerful and memorable love scenes using sensuality over sex. In view of the sensitivity of lF Fiction our subject, participants will take care to maintain a respectful and professional approach in workshop. lHF Hybrid Forms This class is for writers at any stage of the book-writing process. In this workshop we will generate new lM Memoir NF Nonfiction writing through guided exercises and prompts. l lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry Venise Berry lSS Short Story (continues on the next page) lYA Young Adult

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Venise Berry Writing a Successful Book Proposal (continued) Weekend Workshop July 20-21 lNF

A book proposal is your introduction to an agent or editor. It should answer two primary questions: Why will this book sell? Why are you the best person to write it? This workshop will focus on helping participants begin the process of writing a book proposal for various nonfiction forms such as memoir, historical, essays, autobiography, anthology, resource, self-help, how-to, humor, and more. Specific areas of the proposal will be discussed and developed including: title, hook, market, promotion, bio, and outline. This class is for writers at any stage of the book-writing process. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Muddy Water: Controlling Plot, Subplots, and Plot Points in Your Novel Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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How do you create a strong and exciting plot in your novel? How do you connect the plot with various subplots? How do you place plot points effectively throughout your story? This class will help you develop or strengthen your novel’s main plot. It will also help you better understand the use of subplots and the purpose of plot points. To write a great novel it is crucial to recognize how the plot, subplots and plot points create the main sequence of events and figure out the best way to use them to move your story from beginning to end. This class is for writers at any stage of the book-writing process. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Jonathan Blum

Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella, which was named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio and was featured on KCRW’s Bookworm, and The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a forthcoming story collection. His short stories have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Playboy, Sonora Review, as well as Shanxi Literature and others. He has taught fiction writing at Drew University and The University of Iowa. He received a Hawthornden fellowship in Scotland and was a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He is also the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. This is his ninth year teaching at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches fiction writing workshops. He can be found online at jonathanblumwriter.com.

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Who Is I?: Experiments in Fictional Identity Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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We use the word “I” countless times every day to refer to ourselves. But in fiction, “I” refers to something else. It refers to a storytelling creature we invent who has an identity of his or her own. In this class, which is open to writers of all experience levels, we are going to explore the possibilities of first-person singular in fiction. The class is generative; there is no need to bring anything other than your imagination. We will start out by experimenting with autobiographical voices. Who are we really and how do we represent ourselves in stories? But most of our time will be spent doing exercises where you are asked to plumb the psyches of characters whom you may have some personal connection with but who are, in many ways, very different from you. You will create first-person narrators that are everything from damaged to intimate, unreliable to irresistible, from many walks of life. You will mask your narrators, then peel back the masks to reveal deeper meanings. Over the course of the weekend, you will extend your range as a creative writer, taking new risks and discovering new types of fictional truths. By putting yourself in the minds of characters that may make you uneasy, you will confront some of your biggest fears about writing and see what emerges. By the time you go home, you will be on the path to creating exciting, unpredictable new work. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Short Story Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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When was the last time you read a story you couldn’t put down? We all want to write such stories, but how do we do it? In this class, we will workshop short stories of up to 18 pages, with the goal of helping each writer identify and build on the strengths of his/her story. In so doing, we will discuss what makes a story irresistible. Among the questions we will consider: In what ways does this story engage and move us? Does the story have a recognizable structure that serves the writer’s artistic aims? Do the events that make up the plot connect to create meaning? Do we have a strong sense of who the characters are? Is setting used effectively? Does the language capture our imagination? What is the story really about? Class discussion will be frank, focused, and supportive. Throughout the week, you will also do writing exercises, designed to sharpen your fiction writing skills and generate new work. By the end of the week, you will go home not only with fresh ideas for revision but with what could be the beginnings of new stories. In this workshop Key to Genres we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you lAG All Genres bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week. lC Children’s lE Essay lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Sarah Sadie Busse

Sarah Sadie Busse helps people connect to their creativity and to each other. Her poetry chapbook, Do-It- Yourself Paper Airplanes, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, and a full-length collection, We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, came out from LitFest Press in spring 2016. Winner of the Lorine Niedecker, Posner, and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches in a variety of locations, works with poets one- on-one, and hosts occasional retreats for writers and other creative types.

Setting the Stage for Wonder: Magic and Mystery in Children’s Picture Books Weekend Workshop July 20-21 (With Jacqueline Briggs Martin)

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Charles DeLint has written, “When you are touched by magic, nothing’s ever quite the same again.” During our time together, we will explore how to create stories that bring a touch of wonder, magic, to our readers. How do we set the stage for wonder? How do we balance that wonder/that magic with the story’s reality? In this workshop for picture book writers of all levels, we will consider how we can include the uncanny, the inexplicable, in our writing and yet tell a satisfying story. We will look at how we can create stories that leave the reader pondering. We’ll use what we discover to strengthen our own work—perhaps with a touch of wonder, a touch of magic or mystery. Plan to bring copies of your picture book manuscript (800 words or fewer) to share in workshop. The emphasis of our weekend’s work will be on process, as we learn, through critique and conversation, how to deepen our stories and our poems. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home; generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Amy Butcher

Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of the forthcoming Mothertrucker (Little A, Amazon, 2020) and Visiting Hours (Blue Rider Press/Penguin-Random House), a 2015 memoir that earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. More recently, her December 2018 essay “Flight Path” was the grand prize recipient of The Sonora Review’s Flash Essay Contest and her May 2018 essay, “Women These Days,” was named Best Essay of 2018 by Entropy and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in the Best American Essays series by the editors at Brevity. Additional work has been featured on National Public Radio and the BBC, anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2016, and earned notable distinctions in Best American Essays 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The New York Times “Modern Love,” The New York Times Sunday Review, The Washington Post, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and lives in Columbus, Ohio with her two rescue dogs, beautiful beasts.

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Essay Bootcamp: A Generously Generative Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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You’re out of shape, bored of the same routine, or simply haven’t had the time to keep that promise you made to yourself in January. You’re stuck, in other words, in one way or in several. You need that extra push. Welcome to Essay Bootcamp. In this course, we’ll sweat our way back into the writing chair and work our way up to heavy lifting—of pencils and of thought—through a dozen new and generative exercises guaranteed to jumpstart a year of writing. Shaped closely by in-class discussions of a wide variety of both contemporary and canonical essayistic forms (including personal essays, narrative essays, braided essays, lyric essays, and experimental essays, to name a few), our exercises will target point-of- view, chronology, form, voice, and structure, above all requiring us to weave those abstract qualities of beauty and truth—the two pillars of strong, memorable literary essays. While we’ll find ourselves working out daily, worry not: there’s no need to hit the gym. Here, victory takes the shape of new and meaningful work. By the end of our time together, students will have the beginning framework for a dozen new essays, substantial notes for one such essay’s revision through a thorough and constructive critical workshop, and most importantly, deep connections with fellow writers to ensure accountability long beyond your time in Iowa. There is perhaps no greater burn than that found in constructing artful narratives of our lives, and together, we’ll reap the rewards as we sweat our way into peak prose-ical fitness. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

The Literary Memoir Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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Once upon a time, long before the Age of Oprah, writers who had lived through something fascinating or terrible or both would turn their experiences into exaggerated works and call them fiction. Nowadays, however, these experiences equally take the form of memoir—ruminative, retrospective narratives that comprise a sub-genre of the diverse and expansive genre we typically call creative nonfiction. What does this mean? It means, for one, that the artful rendering of personal narratives is increasingly considered valuable and, as luck would have it, marketable in the literary world. But what makes a memoir literary, how do these works best function, and how are they differentiated from autobiography, anecdotal prose, Key to Genres or simple recollection? Perhaps more importantly, considering the flood of memoir manuscripts on the market—the Neilson Bookscan reports a 400% increase published between 2004 and today—how can lAG All Genres we elevate our own personal narratives into artful, meaningful work worthy of readership? In this class, lC Children’s we’ll study and discuss excerpts from some of the most successful and surprising literary memoirs on lE Essay F Fiction the market, discuss the elements that comprise a memorable literary memoir, and work to engage and l HF Hybrid Forms understand the idea that memoir is less interested in the past than the act of remembering and identifying l lM Memoir the many ways past selves continue to inform who we are in the present. Students will develop ideas, a lNF Nonfiction conceptual framework, and key excerpts through in-class and take-home exercises. You’ll leave, in other lN Novel words, with all you need to tell, and sell, your story. In this workshop we will generate new writing through lPW Playwriting guided exercises and prompts. lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Jennifer Colville

Jennifer holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Her stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Mississippi Review, The Iowa Review, Diagram, and on the Huffington Post. A collection of short stories, “Elegies for Uncanny Girls,” was published by Indiana University Press in 2017. She is the founding editor of PromptPress, a journal for the interplay of visual art and writing. Jennifer has taught at The University of Iowa, San Francisco State, the University of San Francisco, and Coe College. She co-runs the Free Generative Writing Workshops in Iowa City.

Imagery for Prose Writers Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Imagery in prose is not merely ornamental, it is necessary. Images unite mind and body; they are active nerve cells branching out, sending reverberations, creating networks and structure across the body of a story or essay. In this workshop, we’ll look at how images operate on both primitive and sophisticated levels. We’ll take inspiration from several highly imagistic prose writers—examine the ways in which they use imagery to create interwoven metaphorical refrains, evoke the uncanny, or give a piece its own unconscious undercurrent. This workshop is a great fit for those wanting to develop the imagistic strength of a piece of existing writing, or for those wanting to launch into new image-based experiments. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Tameka Cage Conley

Tameka Cage Conley, Ph.D., is a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently holds the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in fiction and teaches advanced fiction writing at The University of Iowa. As a literary artist, she writes fiction, poetry, plays, librettos and essays. She received a doctoral degree in English in 2006 from Louisiana State University, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation, Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America, was awarded the annual Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award. She has received writing fellowships from the Cave Canem Poetry Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and Workshops. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Callaloo, African American Review and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first novel, a family epic that chronicles the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades in Caddo Parish.

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Time on My Side?: Managing Time and Tension in Fiction Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Our stories can move chronologically. They can also zigzag and weave in and out of time, utilizing flashback to thrust the plot forward and to strengthen and enhance lines of tension—worry, pressure, stress, dis-ease—that our characters experience as their worlds unfold and reveal struggles for them to face, to ponder, to question, to conquer, to perish from. In this workshop, we will consider how to manage the past, present, and the future in our fiction, while simultaneously watering the seeds of suspense. How do we keep a firm hold on the plot while using time to unlock certain doors and reveal surprising information that propels the story forward? Each day, we will study excerpts of fiction that handle time in engaging, dynamic ways, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Nathan Englander, Ann Patchett, Margot Livesey, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Gaines. After these micro-studies on craft, we will launch into workshop. Writers of all levels and work at all stages of development are welcome. Whether you aspire to write a story or have written several, or you’ve written a novel or desire to but have not as yet, this is a workshop that understands that handling time, movement, and narrative tension can be (and is) a challenge for all of us. In our week together, you will gain an enduring set of applicable tools and craft exercises that will enable you to manage time with skill, clarity, confidence, and uniqueness so that your stories ring out with nuance, curiosity, and drama. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Poet-ing the Self: Memoir and the Lyric Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Who are we and from where do we come? What are the narratives—true, false, somewhere in-between— that have shaped the music of our lives? How can the poetic form be used to interrogate the self in relation to the family, the world at large, and the world that we can’t often see—the world of the soul? This workshop seeks to create space for the poet to sing of herself/himself/themselves, of experience that emboldens and empowers, enriches and sustains narrative voice, though not just any narrative voice, but that which, at its core, is about the self, in an evolving world that disappoints, delights, sickens, saddens, and more. This workshop is for anyone interested and invested in using the tenets of memoir to explore the poetic form. In our weekend, we will discuss how to craft poetry about the self that also incorporates Key to Genres tensions from the larger socio-political landscape, as well as relationships that bear on the self and the lAG All Genres soul. We will read poems by poets such as Terrance Hayes, Elizabeth Alexander, Danez Smith, Morgan lC Children’s Parker, Charif Shanahan, Nicole Sealey, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Yona Harvey, and Ocean Vuong, among lE Essay others. We will also use prompts and writing exercises to generate new poetry. The workshop welcomes lF Fiction HF Hybrid Forms all poets—beginning, advanced, and those in-between. In this workshop we will generate new writing l M Memoir through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in l lNF Nonfiction our weekend. lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Thomas K. Dean

Thomas K. Dean (Ph.D., The University of Iowa) is Senior Presidential Writer/Editor at The University of Iowa, where he also teaches interdisciplinary courses. He has taught writing, literature, and interdisciplinary subjects at Cardinal Stritch College (Milwaukee), Michigan State University, and Moorhead State University (Minnesota). Dean’s essays appear in regional and national publications. His books include The Grace of Grass and Water: Writing in Honor of Paul Gruchow (edited collection, Ice Cube Press, 2007) and Under a Midland Sky (memoir/personal essays, Ice Cube Press, 2008). Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit, a collection of essays and photographs co-authored with Cindy Crosby, is being published by Ice Cube Press in spring 2019.

Shaping the Memoir and Personal Essay Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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The late 19th-century American novelist Frank Norris titled one of his critical essays “Fiction Is Selection.” The same holds true for memoir. When we tell stories from our lives—whether it’s in a short essay, a series of essays, a memoir, or even a full-blown autobiography—we must be selective in what we tell in large part to give our story a shape. What that shape might or should be is one of the biggest questions memoirists and essayists wrestle with. The “shape” of a memoir encompasses a range of issues: Where should the memoir begin and end? What should the overall organization of the work look like? Should I tell my story chronologically or use some other organizing principle—and what should that be? Does everything need to be tied closely together? Do I need to have a thematic arc? Should I focus on selected representative incidents, or should I try to be as comprehensive as I can? To what extent should I use narrative? Is my writing more about my personal character or about my life events? Our week will help you work through such questions and in so doing help you determine how your own story can best be told and how the decisions you make form the larger shape of your writing. Workshop activities will include exercises, discussion of readings, and workshopping your own writing. Students can either bring previously written work for the workshop or write new material during the week. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Revising Sentences for Impact Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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Most writers want to write sentences that are clear and that communicate their intended meaning well. Certainly editors are looking for that! Much of a writer’s creativity lies in his or her talent for choosing words imaginatively. But much of your style also depends on some technicalities about what kind of word forms you choose and where you put them in your sentences. This workshop will focus primarily on those technicalities—not so much choosing the right words, but choosing the right word forms and putting them in your sentences where you get the most “bang for your buck,” so to speak. This means placing the most important words in the most powerful positions in the sentence, weeding out weak function words,

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emphasizing active verbs, and so forth. This is mostly part of the revising and editing process more than the drafting process. We’ll be looking at how to chip away the extraneous material to reveal the beautiful, shining sentence that packs a punch. (Just to be clear—we will be talking about revision at the sentence level; we won’t be addressing overall organization.) Participants don’t need to be grammar experts, but a basic understanding of a sentence’s subject-verb-object structure will be helpful. Most of the workshop time will be spent working through sentences. We’ll do a lot of exercises I bring in but also work on sentences our class members will generate during our time together. While it is not required, participants are welcome to bring writing they have already written that we can work on together as a class. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Amber Dermont

Amber Dermont is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel The Starboard Sea and the short story collection Damage Control. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Amber received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. An Associate Professor of English at Rice University, Amber’s work has appeared in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The Starboard Sea was selected in 2012 by the New York Times Book Review as one of the top 100 Notable Books of the Year.

Novel Manuscript Workshop Two-Week Intensive Workshop July 14-26

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Admission to this workshop is by application only. Enrollment is limited to ten. To apply, submit twenty pages of your novel, a two-page synopsis, and a brief personal statement saying what you hope to achieve by being in the workshop. All of these items—your novel excerpt, synopsis, and personal statement—must be double-spaced and in 12-point type. Key to Genres

The deadline to apply is April 9. You will be notified of decisions by April 26. See Registration Information, lAG All Genres page 85, for further details specific to Two-Week Intensive Workshops. lC Children’s lE Essay Writing a novel is an extraordinary and demanding pursuit—one that requires artistic urgency, writerly lF Fiction intuition, thoughtful planning, risk-taking, stamina and support. Even with all of these elements in place, lHF Hybrid Forms it’s still possible for the most motivated writer to stall out after 100 pages of a manuscript. Some writers lM Memoir push through to complete a first draft only to feel that some necessary piece is missing: an arresting lNF Nonfiction N Novel moment of grace and discovery for both the reader and the writer. In this intensive session, we will l PW Playwriting workshop novel manuscripts between 30,000-75,000 words (120-300 pages). Your manuscript need not l lP Poetry be a completed draft of a novel, but rather a “working” manuscript with enough of a narrative, a sense lSS Short Story of place, character, and conflict to warrant discussion and constructive criticism. Our emphasis will be lYA Young Adult

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Amber Dermont on the literary novel. This workshop will be an opportunity for those of you at work on your initial draft (continued) to share your pages with a group of readers who can help push you deeper into the world of your novel. This workshop will also be an opportunity for those of you who have completed an entire draft and are eager to address concerns over how your manuscript might be polished, refined, edited for pacing, or expanded upon for clarity and dramatic impact. We will consider how additional research might enhance your novel’s narrative authority and we will look to other literary novels as models for our own. We will approach each manuscript on its own terms. In advance of meeting in Iowa City, members of this class will read one another’s manuscripts and provide meaningful feedback. By workshopping your classmates’ manuscripts, you will gain clarity and insight into your own process of revision and composition. We will consider various strategies for redrafting, paying close attention to structure, narrative voice, point of view, and world creation. We will also discuss aspects of publishing including query letters, finding an agent, working with editors, commercial presses versus small presses, and how best to prepare your novel for submission. Together we will strive through our words and stories to reveal something complex and true about the human condition. Participants will read each other’s work before we meet in workshop. This means you will be committing to having a viable draft by May 14; and to reading nine manuscripts by the convening of the class in July.

Kelly Dwyer

Kelly Dwyer is a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two novels, The Tracks of Angels and Self-Portrait with Ghosts, and two children’s books; her monologues and short plays have been produced in Madison, Boston, and New York. She grew up in California and lives in Baraboo (near Madison), Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing part-time, does freelance manuscript editing, and is working on a novel, more plays, and flash fiction inspired by the Disney Princesses at middle age. Visit her online at KellyDwyerAuthor.com.

Writing the Popular Novel (In Any Genre) Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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No matter the genre in which you’re interested—literary, science fiction, paranormal, young adult, romance, etc.—you would probably think it ideal if your novel had many readers. If it attracted buzz. If it were, in other words, popular. In this weekend workshop, we’ll discuss the elements that make popular novels (across genres) so popular (according to bestseller lists and computer algorithms), and do exercises on various elements of the novel, such as character, plot, pacing, theme, style, etc., to increase the odds that your own novels will be widely read. Our goal in this workshop is to help you plan or strengthen your ideas for novels so that they become works of which you are not only proud—but also works that just might enable you to buy that nice little château you have your eye on. This workshop is for writers of all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

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Five Elements of the Novel Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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While there are numerous elements of a novel, it would be difficult—if not quite impossible—to write a successful novel without these five elements in particular: plot, character, dialogue, point of view, and theme. And while of course the elements intertwine, we’ll spend one day focusing on each of them, discussing how to develop each one deeply and successfully in our novels, and doing in-class writing and exercises. Our goal is that by the end of the week, writers will have the skills to continue to develop their plots and characters, the confidence and ability to write good dialogue, the know-how to choose a point a view, and will understand how to develop and deepen their novels’ themes. This course is best suited for experienced writers. You are free to bring a novel you have underway or not; our focus will be on generating new material rather than workshopping existing material, but you may, of course, apply our work in class to existing characters/plots etc. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Plotting the Novel Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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W. Somerset Maugham has said that there are three rules to writing a novel but that, unfortunately, no one knows what they are. We might safely assume though, that one of these rules might have something to do with plot: Maybe we should have one in our novels? Maybe it would be helpful to plan the plot out ahead of time? In this weeklong workshop, we’ll do various exercises to help us develop and deepen our plots. We’ll work on ways in which our plots might arise out of character, and we’ll discuss issues such as how to create more intensity and how to (possibly) juggle and integrate more than one plot at a time. We’ll spend additional time sharing our ideas and plots with one another. Our goal is that by the time the week is over, everyone will have a general outline for a novel plot, and many writers will have a more detailed, annotated outline as well; having these outlines will make it very manageable for all writers to go home and write their novels. This workshop is for writers of all levels. Our primary focus will be on generating new material. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Key to Genres

Flash Fiction in a Flash: Writing (And Submitting) Publishable Flash Fiction lAG All Genres Weekend Workshop July 20-21 lC Children’s lE Essay F SS l l lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms Flash fiction is fiction that tells a story in a flash—anywhere from six words (“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never lM Memoir worn.”—attributed to Hemingway) to a thousand words. In this workshop, we will discuss what flash lNF Nonfiction fiction is and what makes it so interesting, we’ll study and discuss some examples, and of course, we’ll lN Novel complete exercises and assignments, writing some flash of our own that will surprise even its authors! lPW Playwriting The wonderful thing about this genre is that you can be anywhere in your process—from someone who lP Poetry SS Short Story has never written a fictional word, to someone who has published three novels—to benefit from its joys l lYA Young Adult

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Kelly Dwyer and restraints. Our goal is to leave the workshop on Sunday with a few finished pieces of fiction, ready to (continued) submit to magazines, that tell stories in a beautiful, breath-taking flash. (Writers will be given a packet of top online and print magazines to submit their finished works to.) This workshop is for writers of all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Hope Edelman

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestseller Motherless Daughters and the eBook Boys Like That: Two Cautionary Tales of Love. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications, ranging from The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, and Real Simple to The Iowa Review, Brevity.com, and Assay. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year designation, as well as honors from the Medill Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University and The University of Iowa Alumni Fellows program. Hope lives with her husband and two daughters in Los Angeles, where she is working on a new book about the long tail of grief. This is her 19th summer teaching in the Festival.

The Story beneath Your Story: A Memoir-in-Progress Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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Memoirists face two important tasks: First, to tell the plotted story of action, and second, to tell the story of one’s own change and growth over time. That second story, the emotional arc, conveys the author’s larger message, elevating one person’s experience from the unique and personal to the universal and shared. It reveals what your story is truly about. But how do we extract that deeper message from a story, and articulate it to readers in a meaningful way? And how can we expect to achieve this, if we haven’t yet discovered what that larger message is? As Vivian Gornick emphasizes, what happened to an author is not what matters. What matters is what the author makes of those experiences. This class will help you discover what you make of your own story, and give you tools for sharing these insights with readers. Together, we’ll identify the underlying themes and archetypes of your nonfiction narrative. We’ll also create passages of reflection and analysis that will resonate deeply with readers. Come to this workshop with pages you’ve already polished, or first-draft work. Plan to share what you write during the week, and to give to other students as much as you’ll receive in return. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

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Time and Place: What Happened, Where and When Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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“You couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere,” Eudora Welty has famously said. Every story takes place somewhere. But too often, writers don’t allow for or don’t recognize how important Place is to their stories. The same is true for Time, which is overlooked even more often. This workshop acknowledges that narratives unfold within a context of geography, time period, and culture. What happened to you in the past probably could not have happened to you quite that way at any other time or in any other place. Together, we’ll explore the fruitful interaction between the two. Saturday we’ll focus on Place with some short readings and exercises. Sunday we’ll do the same for Time. Participants will leave the weekend with passages they can insert into existing prose and ideas they can build upon. This workshop is open to writers of all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Mieke Eerkens

Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer who grew up between Los Angeles and The Netherlands. She earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, an M.A. in English from the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Magid Center Undergraduate Writing Program and currently teaches creative writing for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Pen America, Pank, Guernica, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her work has further been anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2011; Norton’s Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts; and A Book of Uncommon Prayer, selected as a “notable essay” in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. All Ships Follow Me, a book about her parents’ experiences in WWII and the inheritance of war trauma, is forthcoming from Picador.

Experimenting with Form: Using Creative Structures and Approaches in Our Writing Weekend Workshop June 15-16 Key to Genres lAG All Genres lAG lE lF lHF lNF lSS lC Children’s lE Essay Shopping list as short story. Death certificate as personal narrative. Map as manifesto. Where once writers lF Fiction HF Hybrid Forms were expected to stay inside genre lines and adhere firmly to traditional presentation of their material, l M Memoir contemporary writers increasingly challenge these rigid notions, insisting that the thoughtful exploration l lNF Nonfiction of a subject can be enhanced by a complementary form to add additional layers of meaning. Today’s lN Novel prose might therefore borrow the formats of poetry or drama to most effectively make its point. It might lPW Playwriting masquerade in the unusual form of a dialogue, resume, instruction manual, itinerary, or any of a myriad lP Poetry of traditionally non-literary forms. It might even use forms like comics to present literary content. In this lSS Short Story workshop, we will discuss many of the fun and interesting ways that contemporary writers are pushing the lYA Young Adult

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Mieke Eerkens boundaries by using unconventional forms. We will read contemporary literature that demonstrates (continued) the appropriation of other forms and look closely at how the writers’ deliberate formal choices inform their subject matter. Then we will creatively dive in and experiment with form in our own work, discussing the effectiveness and potential pitfalls of our chosen formal approach in workshop. Expect to break all of your own rules, hit upon brilliant ideas, and have a lot of fun taking your writing into new territories, producing work that you can further develop at home. This is a generative course appropriate for all levels, so bring only your open mind! In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Picture This: Exploring and Incorporating Images into Our Writing Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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From photojournalism, to graphic novels and memoirs, to narrative cartography, the contemporary literary arts are increasingly hybridized, borrowing from other media and unconcerned with crossing categorical boundaries. Visual artists are incorporating language into their work, and writers are incorporating visual components into their work. This course will focus on the interesting ways in which image and language can work together. We will examine the increasingly popular genre of graphic novels and nonfiction. We will look at video essays and poems. We will inspect literary projects that creatively incorporate photography. And we will experiment with incorporating images into our own writing in fun, creative ways, producing material to further develop after our time together. Students may be at any level to benefit from this course, and may either have existing projects they wish to develop, or generate completely new material in class. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Promptapalooza 2019 Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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This fun weekend course promises to stock you with enough fresh material for 10 essays, stories, or even a book to flesh out over the months following the class. In an invigorating, supportive, no-pressure environment, we’ll use tested and effective writing prompts to get some beginnings down on paper for further development when you go home. We’ll have some time to discuss and share some of our work each day and get some feedback on how to proceed with the work we’ve generated, as well as get a list of prompts to generate new material at home. Appropriate for all levels. 10 prompts. 2 days. Let’s do this! In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

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Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop) is a playwright, fiction writer, and founding member of Working Group Theatre. Her plays have been developed and produced at theaters across the country, including at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (CA), Phoenix Theatre (IN), Urbanite Theatre (FL), Tennessee Women Playwrights Theatre, Centenary Stage Company (NJ), Available Light Theatre (OH), the Source Festival (DC) Palm Beach Dramaworks (FL), and Hancher and Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, among others. She is the recipient of the NEFA National Theatre Award (with Working Group Theatre) for her two-play project, Out of Bounds, the Kennedy Center’s National Science Playwriting Award for Atlas of Mud, and she was nominated for the ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award for Birth Witches. Her newest play, Apples in Winter, which won the NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theatre and the Susan Glaspell Award, is currently having six productions across the country. An expat Canadian, she made theatre for many years in Toronto before crossing the border. Visit Jennifer online at jenniferfawcett.org.

Writing around the Edges Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Have you heard the anecdote about the writer who wrote 900 pages and then was ready to start her book? Extreme as that may seem, the point is that sometimes the best way to develop your story is to write around the edges of it, to discover the world around the plot, the history of characters, the provenance of an object. In other words, sometimes you have to write a lot that won’t go directly on the page but will flavor everything else that does. The map of the old house, the contents of the bedside table, the one who wasn’t included in the family photograph—none of these are focused directly on plot and yet any of them might help you discover that elusive plot point or reveal the subconscious drives behind your character’s actions. Why? Because in a well written story, everything is connected. If writing is weaving, then every character, every event, every object, is a thread. Wherever they cross, energy is created. In this workshop, writers will dig deep into the world of their fiction to excavate the complexities and contradictions of their characters and bring the world of their story fully into view. We will investigate what has spilled out on the page in the excitement of the first draft and begin the work of refining, deepening and mining the story within. For this reason, this workshop is best suited to fiction writers who have a complete, or near complete draft. Writers should leave the workshop with Key to Genres a new understanding of the work they’ve done, and a clear path into revision. In this workshop we will lAG All Genres generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts. lC Children’s lE Essay lF Fiction A Play in a Week: The Building Blocks of Playwriting lHF Hybrid Forms Weeklong Workshop July 14-19 lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lPW lN Novel lPW Playwriting Words and actions, these are the fundamental building blocks of plays. Subtext, motivation, desire, lP Poetry emotion, humor, suspense… How do you communicate these if you don’t have those long descriptive lSS Short Story paragraphs where a character remembers her childhood or anticipates the end of his relationship? (Sure, lYA Young Adult

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Jennifer Fawcett you can put in lots of stage directions but no one reads those.) Hint: you communicate all of this and (continued) more through what your characters SAY and what they DO. The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence. And that’s essential too. The goal of this workshop is to dig into the building blocks of playwriting: character and action, dialogue and subtext, plot and structure. We will use examples from some of the modern masters: Miller, Churchill, Pinter, Wallace, Ruhl, Kushner (and others) to borrow from the best. We will read our work out loud every day—it’s the only way to know if it is working. We will generate a lot of writing through short in-class exercises and daily homework assignments. In the end, you will likely have the beginnings of a play. You will definitely have a diverse collection of scenes and characters to draw from, and a better understanding of how to write dialogue that propels your story forward. This is a workshop for writers of all levels and backgrounds. No prior playwriting experience is required. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Solo Performance 101 Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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One voice telling one story. The one-person play harkens back to the storyteller spinning a tale around the campfire. It can be fiction or nonfiction, it can have one character or many (yes, you can have dialogue in a solo performance), it can involve projections and props and pyrotechnics, or it can just be one person standing on a bare stage asking the audience to come with them on a journey. No matter what form it takes, a play for one is a unique piece of theatrical magic for the actor, the audience and the writer. In this workshop, writers will be asked to arrive with a story they want to tell. Facts are optional. Over eight intensive hours together, we will explore different ways to bring this story to life on the page and on our feet. We will play with point of view, with lies and truth and unreliable narrators; we will experiment with body language and props and the use of silence. We will think of character in terms of gestures, impulses and need. Acting skills are definitely not required, though you should be prepared to read your work aloud. This will be a safe space to explore a new way to connect with your reading audience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

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Hugh Ferrer

Hugh Ferrer (M.F.A. in fiction, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is a senior editor at The Iowa Review and the associate director of The University of Iowa International Writing Program. He has taught a variety of courses at The University of Iowa, introducing undergraduates to fiction writing, international literature, journal publishing, and Iowa City’s literary culture.

In Convincing Style: Prose Textures, Poetic Effects Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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Between contemporary fiction and creative nonfiction, there is no hard border, and both forms teem with morally ambiguous situations, judgment-free (or unreliable, or multiple) narrators, and complex characters. In both, it is common to leave the reader to decide what the story means. Themes are suggested, not imposed; and moral emotions may be awoken, but not necessarily resolved. Surprisingly, an open-ended coherence seems to suit many modern readers just fine—they want to be moved without being preached at. This workshop will be exploring the stylistic and structural conventions that allow a piece of writing to be both open-ended and coherent. It may be useful for fiction writers who find themselves sliding towards memoir, for creative nonfiction writers testing the boundaries of invention, and for poets or writers already comfortable with the fundamentals (of character, plot, scene, setting, etc.) who are curious about the effects created by blending fact and fiction, or who are trying to marry multiple realities into one work. This is a highly generative workshop, with new prompts each day. Over the course of the week, we’ll progress through several different styles of narrative persuasion, drafting structured work that leaves interesting gaps for a reader to navigate. You’ll come away not only with the start of future projects, but also with a greater trust in your potential readers. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Clock and Camera: Immersing the Reader Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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Key to Genres Plot and character may drive the action in most fiction, but time-management and “camerawork” are AG All Genres crucial for enriching the story and drawing a reader in. This weekend session is open to all levels, but will l C Children’s be particularly useful for writers who feel comfortable with the basics and are looking for techniques to l lE Essay make their storytelling more dynamic, dynamic because time-management and camerawork thrive on lF Fiction variation, as much as on consistency. At any point in a story, the normal forward tempo of time—maybe lHF Hybrid Forms for a sentence, or maybe for a passage—stops (for a description of the mud room beside the kitchen) or lM Memoir rewinds itself in a blur (for a flashback of how the windowpane got cracked) or speeds up (for a sweeping lNF Nonfiction summary of how that crack spread in subtle ways throughout the house). Likewise, a single short lN Novel paragraph that begins with a bird’s-eye view of a city might zoom in and finish inside one character’s inner lPW Playwriting monologue. Over the course of the weekend, we’ll look at dozens of examples of both techniques and do lP Poetry guided writing exercises so that you can feel from the inside the textures these techniques create. Most lSS Short Story importantly, we’ll examine how the two techniques influence each other—how time-management affects lYA Young Adult

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Hugh Ferrer the camerawork, and vice versa. You’ll go home with the tools to make your narrator nimbler and your (continued) storytelling more penetrating. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Inventing Memory: A Workshop on Imagery Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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This generative workshop is for poets and writers who wish to create vivid, poignant, emotionally memorable imagery. The week will cover a wealth of material: poetry and storytelling since forever have been exploring new ways to be the opposite of boring, and we’ll be poring over examples from the ancient to the modern, across all genres, to find inspiration and technical guidance. The challenge then as now is to take what is immediate to us—either from personal experience or inspiration—and make it immediate to the reader; so there will be daily exercises and free writing to practice a variety of techniques. By the end of the week, transforming your most vivid memories and imaginings into words will come more naturally; your work will have new light and space, and your imagery will be sharper and more moving. Best of all, you will have many new pages to serve as the seeds for future projects. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems, most recently If You Have to Go (Graywolf Press, 2018). Her third book, Blood Lyrics, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum, her second, was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review. A graduate of Harvard University and The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside, and lives in South Pasadena with her young daughter. She’s taught at the Festival intermittently since 2003, and it is her very favorite place to be.

Draft after Draft: Write a Dozen Poems Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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In this generative weekend course, we will spend the majority of each session writing from original prompts designed to wrench you out of your ruts and open you to the vast array of poetic shapes and styles. To that end, you’ll receive a selection of poems throughout the weekend that we will discuss in order to ignite our creativity toward our own new drafts. A wide variety of exercises will be practiced, with a goal of twelve new “starts” or drafts. This course will be productive for any student—the person who has never written a poem and the person who has published books. Whatever level you are at, new methods must be

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forged in order to keep the imagination vital. In preparation, purchase a notebook and loveable pens. In Key to Genres this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts. lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay Advanced Poetry Workshop: Heart, Guts, & Craft lF Fiction Weeklong Workshop June 23-28 lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir P l lNF Nonfiction lN Novel This workshop is a communal effort toward deep and considered critique of original poems by lPW Playwriting participants. Our depth of engagement will be open, warm, and full of goodwill toward writer and lP Poetry poem. What we’re after is the mesmerizing poem, no matter the style, form, or subject. The beginning lSS Short Story half of each session will focus on a sample of masterful poems from history that might act as guides lYA Young Adult and examples of poetic techniques, including lineation, lyricism, diction, form, and figuration. Writing exercises included. We will dedicate the other half of each session to workshop. Each participant will have three poems workshopped. These poems will not be required to be sent in advance. Outside of class, each participant will conference individually with me over two separate poems, leaving the week with a renewed vigor toward five poems and my high hopes that the techniques and questions of the course will leave a lasting impression upon the artistry of your future work. “Advanced” means you have three poems you want workshopped, and that you bring these four things to each class: heart, guts, pen, and paper. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

Max Garland

Max Garland is the author of The Word We Used for It, winner of the 2017-18 Brittingham Poetry Prize. Previous books include The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition. He has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, a Michener Fiction fellowship, inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and fellowships in both poetry and fiction from the Wisconsin Arts Board. A native of Kentucky, where he worked as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he is Professor Emeritus at UW-Eau Claire and the current Writer-in-Residence for the city of Eau Claire. He is also a songwriter and the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.

Familiarizing the Strange/Mystifying the Familiar: A Poetry Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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Borrowing a phrase from Toni Morrison, in this workshop we’ll help each other imagine our way toward what seems distant, strange, remote to our experience. Also, we’ll work our poems toward a deeper imagining of things close at hand: people, places and things so familiar we may have become blinded to their beauty or sadness or depth. One thinks of Pablo Neruda’s odes on common objects which wind up exploding the mundane into the fabulous. Or of Wislawa Symborska’s meditation on a grain of sand

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Max Garland (echoing William Blake’s elevations of the small into the celestial). Can poetry bring us closer to what (continued) we don’t understand, what seems distant, even alien to our experience? Conversely, how can poetry help us rediscover the inherent mystery in what’s close at hand? According to Toni Morrison, those two challenges are at the heart of the art of writing. Using examples from Blake, Whitman, Symborska, Tracy K. Smith, and others, we’ll challenge ourselves to write new poems during the week, with special emphasis on these tasks—bridging the gap between what we know and what we don’t; and rediscovering the strangeness in what at times seems all too familiar (home, family, landscape). The underlying goal is to nudge each other toward poems that surprise, illuminate, and enrich our experience. The class will offer daily writing prompts, examples from well-known and newer poets, a group of attentive readers and listeners, and vast quantities of good will. Though we’ll look at examples of previous poems, the emphasis in this workshop will be to get us writing, and workshops will offer feedback to nudge those new drafts along. Each day we’ll respond to writing assignments and prompts, and the goal is for everyone to leave with new poems generated during the week. Think of this as an opportunity to write with a little help from your (new) friends. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Allen Gee

Allen Gee is currently the DL Jordan Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Columbus State University. Prior to teaching at CSU, he served as the Director of the M.F.A. Program at Georgia College, where he taught for thirteen years. He has been the Editor of Gulf Coast, the Fiction Editor for Arts & Letters, and currently serves as the Editor for both the multicultural imprint 2040 Books and the newly formed DLJ Books. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Houston, his writing can be found in Ploughshares, The Common, Crab Orchard Review, Terrain, Lumina, and other journals. His essay collection, My Chinese America, was published in 2015, and he’s recently completed a novel, The Iron Road. He’s also been a Yaddo fellow and has received numerous fellowships and grants. He is at work now on James Alan McPherson’s biography, At Little Monticello, and other projects. He is married to Renee Dodd and has two daughters, Ashley and Willa.

The M.F.A. Application Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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Every writer applying for an M.F.A. struggles to know how to put together a strong application, especially if you’re the first family member to apply to graduate school, or if you’ve been away from academia, or if you weren’t an English major. What goes into the application from the cover letter, to the resume or c.v., to recommendation letters and the personal statement, and of course, what should the writing sample look like? This workshop considers the entire portfolio process, shares common mistakes and oversights, including organizing an application timetable. Above all, this workshop focuses on writing, but with the most specific academic audience in mind, creative writing faculty members. (Note: the instructor is a former M.F.A. program director who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a Ph.D. at the University of Houston). In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

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Writing America Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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So many creative nonfiction writers have a story to tell, but want to know how to bring their work to a greater level of significance. Writing race, feminism, immigration, nature and the environment, or delving into childhood and beyond—how do we develop and emphasize themes stemming from our personal stories/essays to speak to larger issues? How do we protest artfully, or chronicle most poignantly? This workshop will help nonfiction writers at all skill levels refine their craft, or clarify the meaning of their writing. Advance readings will be provided so that we can start a dialogue with shared common ground. The goal will be to sharpen one piece, or perhaps more. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Cecile Goding

Cecile Goding (M.F.A, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., The University of Iowa Program in Nonfiction Writing) comes from Florence, South Carolina. She has worked for adult literacy nonprofits, universities, libraries, polyester mills, computer companies, neighborhood centers, metal scrapyards, and a prince. Her poems, essays, and short fiction appear in journals, books, and newspapers of all sizes, and around town. Current projects include translations of Arabic stories, two memoirs, travel poems, and the eternal opera.

Call and Response: A Workshop in Correspondence Writing Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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What can you say in a 500-word paragraph? Or in 200 words? When you show that paragraph to another writer, what might they create, sparked by a memory or a phrase of yours they have just now read? Whatever it is, you can’t wait to see it. You can’t wait to write back. There. You have begun a different way of responding to the work of another. Can we write a whole book like this? Yes, we can. During this writing Key to Genres retreat, we will not read manuscripts. We will not so much comment on others’ work directly, although lAG All Genres we may have suggestions. Rather, we will respond with work of our own, producing paragraphs some lC Children’s might call prose poems. Others might feel more like anecdotes. In any case, your writing will shine and lE Essay deepen, as fellow writers awaken what Philip Lopate calls “that shiver of self-recognition.” Read After the lF Fiction Fact, a correspondence between Marvin Bell and Chris Merrill. Read Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blue.” Read lHF Hybrid Forms Rita Dove’s “Quaker Oats” or Patricia Ikeda’s “Three Churches.” Before we meet in Iowa City, I’ll send lM Memoir you examples and prompts to start you off, so you’ll hit the ground running, with paragraphs ready to be lNF Nonfiction read and answered in kind. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and lN Novel prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week. lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Cecile Goding After the Bell: A Workshop for Schoolteachers (continued) Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Before I came to Iowa, back in the South Carolina county where I grew up, I became a teacher. Specifically, I taught those who had left school early on and later decided to give education a second look. Those brave, funny students—no one has taught me more. What exactly I learned is a question worth a lifetime. For one weekend at least, let’s write in the company of fellow teachers. Together, let’s give our school experiences a good airing-out. What sustained us in that complex microcosm known as the classroom? What are the frustrations and challenges reflected in today’s day-to-day routine? Whether you are a fiction writer, using an urban school as your setting; whether you are creating a memoir of your own days as a student; or whether your poems best capture what it feels like to be behind the desk, this weekend is for you. No previous writing is required, but feel free to bring something you are working on. Bring photos, journal entries, and a lot of blank pages. Plan to fill them up, as we begin with tried-and-true writing prompts, sending us back into the classroom for a second look. Writers at all levels of experience, and in any genre, are most welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of eight collections of poems, and “Life in Transition,” a series of 31 essays on gender in America, archived at The American Scholar online. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in leading journals, newspapers and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship from The New School, and the Donald Murray prize for writing pedagogy. She has taught in M.F.A. programs, public schools, prisons, living rooms and, for 18 years, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Her website is dianagoetsch.com.

“Cut These Words and They Bleed”: A Nonfiction Writing Intensive Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Nonfiction is the most flexible of writing genres, encompassing essays, memoir, articles, op-eds, columns, letters. When any of these forms are done well, the execution of craft brings factual writing to the level of art. “Cut these words and they bleed,” Ralph Emerson said of Montaigne, whose essays were so lucid they pulsed with life. This will be a hands-on class for nonfiction writers wishing to stretch their capacities. There will be examples, exercises and feedback, with an eye on elevating our craft—to a point where editors find it hard to resist. This course is led by a longtime disciple of William Zinsser, someone uniquely capable of transmitting the teachings of one of America’s great nonfiction gurus. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

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Free-Writing Intensive: A Workshop for All Genres Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Most of us write a first draft the same way every time no matter the subject, falling into habitual patterns that either become unconscious or get mistaken for our “voice.” It is a lot like how we dance at parties: there are countless ways to move in space, and yet we wind up doing the same old two-step that (if we’re honest with ourselves) we’re sick of. The Free-Writing Intensive is a week-long training in a task that is rarely taught, yet continually in our face: the act of filling a page. This impactful workshop (first introduced 10 years ago at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and since offered at conferences throughout the U.S.) opens the vault to a series of counter-intuitive and delightful techniques designed to alter our writing “DNA,” freeing us from obstacles that undermine creativity. We will start to recognize “doorways” that previously went unnoticed, portals of opportunity calling to be entered. Above all, we’ll learn how to surprise ourselves on the page—surprise being the key ingredient of any first draft (without which it’s senseless to revise). Participants of this workshop typically emerge with two valuable bi- products: 1) they become inoculated from “writer’s block”; 2) they go home with a prodigious volume of new material. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Five New Poems: A Generative Workshop for All Levels Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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A two-day immersion in the act of generating poetry, in the presence of a veteran poet known for generously sharing her practice. We’ll look at the many ways poems can arrive, and how we can cultivate our receptivity to them. We will learn ways to broaden our range of subjects and styles, ways to write the poem that eludes us, how to handle emotionally challenging material, and how to write without an agenda (giving rise to poems we never expected). The goal is to get first drafts of 5 new poems by the end of the weekend, which will be reached, or exceeded, with surprising ease. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Key to Genres

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Eric Goodman

Eric Goodman’s fifth novel, Twelfth and Race, was published in 2012 by the University of Nebraska Press Flyover Fiction series. He is the recipient of three Ohio Arts Council fellowships as well as residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts, Ragdale, and the MacDowell Colony. Goodman has also published more than 150 articles and essays, with work appearing in the LA Times Sunday Magazine, GQ, Travel & Leisure, Saveur, and several anthologies. For the past decade, Goodman has directed the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Write Funny to Me Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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This weekend workshop is designed for prose writers of all levels, scribblers of fiction or creative nonfiction who would like to learn how to be funny, or in many cases, funnier, on the page. Whether a writer’s intentions are ultimately serious or light-hearted, being able to make readers laugh is a sure way to attract and to hold their attention. If a writer can amuse readers they’ll follow you straight to the cash register. Just ask Sedaris. This class will be generative, beginning with short readings and exercises. We’ll work on dialogue and distinguish between character and slapstick-based humor. You will likely end the weekend having learned a trick or two and maybe a joke. More importantly, you’ll emerge with a whetted sense of how to be funny on the page, and you’ll have fun doing it. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week/weekend.

The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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This is an advanced novel writing workshop. It is designed for students who are fairly far along in or have finished the draft of a novel. Each student will submit up to fifteen pages—preferably the first fifteen, but not necessarily—to be considered in workshop. We will discuss, as a group, how to go from rough draft to final draft. What needs to be done? What’s the best way to do it? How do you know when you’re finished? How do you prepare a manuscript to submit it to an agent or publisher? Instructor Eric Goodman has published five novels. Eighteen of his former students have published first books, including several who have taken this class. This will be a completely honest, straightforward workshop designed to help you get to the next level as a writer. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

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Vince Gotera

Vince Gotera is a Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa where he served as Editor of the North American Review (2000-2016). He is now the Editor of Star*Line, the print journal of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. His collections of poems include Dragonfly, Ghost Wars, Fighting Kite, and the upcoming Pacific Crossing and The Coolest Month. Recent poems appeared in the science-fiction poetry anthology Multiverse (UK), Proud to Be: Writings by American Warriors (Volume 6), and Hay(na)ku 15: A Commemorative 15th Year Anniversary Anthology, as well as the journals Abyss & Apex, Altered Reality Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Crooked Teeth Literary Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Eye to the Telescope, Grievous Angel, Parody Poetry Journal, Philippines Graphic (Philippines), Rosebud, Silver Blade, and Voices de la Luna. He won the 2017 Veterans’ Writing Prize from Stone Canoe journal and his art was featured on the covers of Killjoy Literary Magazine, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and Dreams and Nightmares. He blogs at The Man with the Blue Guitar (vincegotera.blogspot.com).

Wilderness Map: Beginning Poetry Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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In his poem “A Course in Creative Writing,” William Stafford wrote that students of poetry “want a wilderness with a map.” In this beginning poetry workshop, we will begin to explore the wilderness of poetry writing with three basic elements: image, sound, and form. This class will provide a map for poets who are starting out, as well as those who have written a bit and would like to expand their skills. Before we meet, you will send me five poems—yes, even if they are your first poems ever—and during our week together you will write a poem or two. We will workshop your poems in class, that is, discuss them in terms of craft and technique as well as meaning and import. Our overall goal is to help you be comfortable in the wilderness of poetry and begin to think of yourself as a poet. After this workshop, you should be able to write a poem you can be proud of and express your opinions and observations about poems and poetry. Stafford ends his poem, “a world begins under the map.” That is the world where I hope we all end up, where poetry is no longer a wilderness. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

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Jazz June: Sound and Writing Poems lAG All Genres Weekend Workshop June 15-16 lC Children’s lE Essay lP lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms Many beginning poets become quickly proficient with alliteration—the repetition of beginning sounds lM Memoir in nearby words—”lurk late” or “strike straight” or “jazz June” (examples from the poem “We Real Cool” lNF Nonfiction by Gwendolyn Brooks). The problem is, they begin to overuse alliteration and rely on it too much. In lN Novel this poetry workshop, we will explore other ways of patterning sound in poems—assonance, consonance, lPW Playwriting rhyme, onomatopoeia, and of course, also alliteration—especially more difficult applications of these lP Poetry techniques, such as rich consonance and slant rhyme. This class is geared toward those who are fairly lSS Short Story experienced already in writing poems. Before the workshop, you will send me three poems in which you lYA Young Adult

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Vince Gotera are expressly playing with sound. During our weekend, you will also write one poem applying sound (continued) concepts we discuss in class. We will workshop your poems in class and discuss how better to work with sound. Our goal is to help you become more aware of your use of sonic effects and improve how you employ sound. What you will find after the workshop is that your growing skills in using sound in poems will affect all your writing, not just poems but other genres as well, even nonfiction essays. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Sands Hall

Sands Hall’s recent memoir, FLUNK. START. Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint Press) was listed in the top ten books in Religion and Spirituality, Spring 18, by Publisher’s Weekly. She is also the author of a novel, Catching Heaven, a Random House Reader’s Circle selection; and of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. Her short fiction has appeared in such journals as New England Review, The Iowa Review, and Green Mountains Review. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a second M.F.A. in Theatre Arts and is a playwright, as well as a singer/songwriter. Sands is an associate teaching professor of English and creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College. This is the twenty-seventh summer she has taught for the Festival.

Do I Really Know My Narrator? Strengthening Point of View Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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Whether we’re working on stories or a novel, a memoir or creative nonfiction, it’s essential to understand point of view. Yet the topic can seem vast and inchoate—or so simplistic that it’s possible to wonder what the fuss is about. This course is designed to clarify this delightful aspect of all creative writing, and to give you tools to delve into this rewarding piece of craft. With the help of published examples, we’ll examine various options and strategies, and the reasons for selecting one particular POV over another. Short assignments, in and out of class, will strengthen your appreciation of how other writers employ point of view, deepen your understanding of your narrator(s) (even if that narrator is yourself), and how to get them effectively onto the page. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Fiction Strategies for the Memoirist Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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Are you working on a memoir? This course is designed for you. It will also be useful to any writer interested in exploring how fictional strategies help us get our personal stories effectively across to the reader. We’ll study published examples that incorporate specific tools of craft, and daily writing exercises ask you to apply these techniques to your own writing. These assignments, shared in a workshop forum,

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include how to build scenes using remembered moments, how point of view applies to the nonfiction writer, and how to move effectively between scene and summary and—in that ingredient essential to any memoir—reflection. Class discussion includes the subject of personal style as well as the application of these techniques to your particular manuscript. Come prepared to read and write daily; you will leave with powerful tools to improve your entire manuscript. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley has published twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune. His work has been published in such journals and newspapers as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Sun, and many anthologies internationally. Among his books are the popular craft books Turning Life into Fiction and A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, as well as the anthologies Extreme Fiction (with Michael Martone) and I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (with Hope Edelman). Robin is a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He directed The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program for nine years, and is a Professor Emeritus at the UI. He currently directs the Writing Program and is Writer-in-Residence at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and is also an associate faculty member at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

The Frangible Memoir Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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“Frangible” has two meanings: able to be broken up into many parts and bullets that disintegrate upon impact. We’ll be approaching the memoir this week in both senses of the word—looking at memoir and memory in terms of fragmentation, writing brief snippets of memoir in a series of exercises, and creating little explosions on the page, brief bursts that suggest more than they state explicitly. This class is designed for both poets and prose writers who are drawn less to narrative and more to suggestion and metaphor. The Key to Genres

idea will be to create snippets of memory and observations, some a sentence in length, some a phrase, some a lAG All Genres paragraph that, when put side by side, tell stories of the gaps and absences in our lives. As texts, we’ll be using lC Children’s Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Abigail Thomas’ Safekeeping, as well as the work of Ashley Butler and others. In lE Essay this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts. lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Christine Hemp

Christine Hemp has aired her essays and poems on NPR’s Morning Edition, and a poem of hers has traveled over a billion miles on a NASA mission to monitor the pre-natal activity of stars. Her awards include a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship for Literature, an Iowa Review Award for Nonfiction, and the Harvard University Extension Award for Teaching Writing. She has been selected to travel statewide for the 2019 and 2020 Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau with her talk “From Homer to #hashtags,” which explores our changing language—and how it changes us. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington with two horses, two cats, and one husband.

The Short-Short Nonfiction Triptych Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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This class is for anyone passionate about the short form who wants to create—in one weekend—a suite of three related pieces 300 words or less. We will read the new New York Times “Tiny Modern Love” pieces, Beth Ann Fennelly’s micros from Heating and Cooling, and other short-shorts from Brevity Magazine and Hippocampus. We will also study triptychs in visual art—Renaissance altar pieces, Sas Colby’s assemblages, Rothko’s horizontal bands, Bacon’s sets of figures—and learn how single pieces can correspond to others metaphorically, thematically, or narratively. Poets are welcome, as is anyone—novice or experienced writer—who wishes to experiment with the highly-charged language of short-short nonfiction. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Belonging: The Geographies of Nonfiction Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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Especially during times of change and upheaval, we yearn for something called home. Whether you’ve arrived from another country, have lived in one Iowa farmhouse your whole life, or you relocate to a new city every year, this class is about the places we inhabit. How have they changed us (for better or for worse)? Why do they transform us—yet again—when we write about them? And why do some houses or landscapes offer us a sense of belonging? This is a generative week, and we’ll do lots of writing in and out of class. We will also explore contemporary writers’ work, such as Sally Mann, James Galvin, Brian Doyle, Hillary Mantel, and refugee stories collected by Viet Thanh Nguyen and learn how to conjure a sense of place with scene, reflection, and summary. We’ll also explore how certain settings might demand an inventive structure and why the five senses come into play. Participants will leave with a working draft of an essay or chapter of a memoir—and a deeper sense of what it means to “dwell.” Both novice and experienced writers are welcome. Expect to be surprised. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

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Jim Heynen

Jim Heynen is best known for his short-short stories: The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap (Graywolf Press); You Know What is Right (North Point Press); The One-room Schoolhouse (Knopf); The Boys’ House (Minnesota Historical Society Press); and Ordinary Sins (Milkweed Editions). Many of these stories have been read on NPR’s All Things Considered, and Minnesota astronaut George Pinky Nelson took a recording of Heynen’s stories for bedtime listening on his last space mission. His short-shorts are widely anthologized; the most recent appears in the 2018 Norton anthology: New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. Heynen has also published three novels: The Fall of Alice K. (Milkweed Editions); Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice (YA, Henry Holt); and Being Youngest (YA, Henry Holt) as well as several collections of poetry, including A Suitable Church (Copper Canyon Press) and Standing Naked: New and Selected Poems (Confluence Press). He wrote prose vignettes for two photography books published by The University of Iowa Press, Harker’s Barns and Sunday Afternoon on the Porch. His major nonfiction book, One Hundred Over 100 (Fulcrum Publishers), featured 100 American centenarians. For many years he was Writer-in-Residence at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both poetry and fiction.

Writing Emotions Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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In this workshop, we’ll confront the challenge of writing emotional scenes—or emotional moments— whether they are in fiction, nonfiction or poetry. How can we be sincere about our own or a character’s emotions without appearing sentimental or garish? We’ll confront some of these challenging questions, we’ll look at some successful models, and we’ll see if we can apply successful techniques while still being true to the emotions we hope to deliver to our readers. The goal will be to write some prize-winning emotionally charged moments in whatever form you choose. The weekend will include in-class handouts as well as in-class and out-of-class writing exercises. Open to all levels of writing experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

From Memory to Art: Poems, Prose Poems, Short-Short Fiction Key to Genres Weeklong Workshop June 16-21 lAG All Genres C Children’s lAG lF lHF lNF lP l lE Essay F Fiction This workshop will begin with life experience, but we’ll use what we remember as a springboard for l lHF Hybrid Forms imaginative verbal adventures. The moment we give our attention to form, whether that be in the music lM Memoir and repetition we associate with poetry or the structure and narrative progression we associate with lNF Nonfiction fiction, what we thought was only a memory can take on new and unexpected life. We’ll use the writing lN Novel process itself to discover what in our experience is calling for our attention as writers, and we’ll explore lPW Playwriting ways of seeing how memory can feed the imagination rather than limit it. This workshop is especially lP Poetry suited for those who like to write in short forms, but we’ll try different approaches to our subjects so that lSS Short Story everyone will be able to find which avenue will lead in the most rewarding direction. The week will include lYA Young Adult

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Jim Heynen in-class handouts as well as in-class and out-of-class writing exercises. Open to all levels of writing (continued) experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Charles Holdefer

Charles Holdefer (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Ph.D., Sorbonne) is the author of Magic Even You Can Do (flash fiction, 2019) and George Saunders’ Pastoralia: Bookmarked (nonfiction, 2018), as well as four novels, including The Contractor (2007), which was an American Booksellers Association “Book Sense Pick.” This novel has been translated into several languages. His short fiction won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Slice and elsewhere. He also writes essays and reviews for New York Journal of Books, Entropy, Dactyl Review, and The Collagist. He teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. Visit him online at charlesholdefer.com.

The Balancing Act: Narration, Character and Dialogue in Fiction Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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Telling a story well requires a sure touch with narration, characterization and dialogue. But how do you find the right balance? This is a nuts-and-bolts craft workshop that welcomes fiction writers of all levels. We’ll look at brief samples from contemporary writers (Zadie Smith, George Saunders, et al.) and do several exercises that will allow participants to generate new writing or to experiment with their own work-in-progress. Each writer will also be invited to workshop a short story, novel excerpt, or hybrid text. We’ll consider characterization techniques and questions like dialogue tags, dialect, idiolect, profanity (yes, swearing is an artful activity!) and slang. We’ll also explore when to give your characters a rest and let your narrator do the talking. The common saying, “Show don’t tell” isn’t always true, but this fact begs the questions: How do I show? When do I tell? We’ll look at options of external narration and internal narration of characters’ actions and thoughts. Writers will leave this workshop with a keener appreciation of the tools at their disposal and how they might serve their story. In this workshop we will generate new Key to Genres writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide lAG All Genres feedback on writing you produce in our week. lC Children’s lE Essay lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Naomi Jackson

Naomi Jackson is author of the novel The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It is the winner of Late Night Library’s 2016 Debut-litzer Prize. First Lady of New York City Chirlane McCray selected the novel for the City’s 2016 Gracie Book Club. Jackson is a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad, including Tin House, brilliant corners, Obsidian, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Writer. Jackson has taught at The University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, Queens College, and Oberlin College. Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents.

This Summer, You Write Your Novel Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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Stephen King suggests that a novel should be written in a season. Walter Mosley’s This Year, You Write Your Novel offers advice on how to do what his title suggests. In this workshop, you will make significant progress towards the goal of finishing a complete first draft of your novel by the end of the summer. Participants will cheer each other on as we break obstacles to our projects’ completion. Each writer will submit and receive substantive feedback on a new excerpt of their novel-in-progress. Appropriate for beginning as well as advanced writers, this weeklong workshop will be of particular interest to those who want to strengthen character development and employ new ideas for plotting and structuring their manuscripts. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

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Wayne Johnson

Wayne Johnson (M.F.A. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is the author of, among other books, five novels, a collection of stories, a memoir, and two nonfiction works. Three of his books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and two have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, O. Henry and Best American Short Stories citations, and a Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project Fellowship in L.A., sponsored by Steven Spielberg. Wayne has worked in Hollywood for nearly twenty years. As a ghostwriter/editor he has seen over 40 books to completion, and as a script doctor has worked on countless films, two of which were Sundance finalists for Best Drama, and another a 2018 finalist for Best Screenplay at the Brooklyn Film Festival. Wayne has new books and films in development and forthcoming with major publishers, studios, and cable television.

Novel Solutions Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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You’ve been working on this story for...how long? Months? Years? It’s supposed to look like a novel, but now that you’ve got it in front of you, it looks more like a six-legged cow or a bus with wings. You’ve begun to wonder what, exactly, a “novel” is. You might be writing a cycle-of-stories-as-novel, or a faux memoir, or a “modular” novel with some unifying structural element. In this class, we’ll look at ways of structuring novel-length narratives to create a variety of fully-engaging, satisfying works. We’ll examine traditional plot structures, as well as a host of others, using examples from contemporary literature. We’ll address pacing, psychic distance, aspects of “voice,” and more. Participants will bring opening chapters, or middle chapters, or even notes and notions to class, all of which will serve as springboards into the realm of enchantment. We’ll consider the possibilities. Always, the structural solution for the most compelling rendering of the story will be novel to the writer, will fit his or her narrative impulses. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

Telling the Tale: A Nonfiction Workshop Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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All of us encounter dramas in life that seem tailor-made for narrative. But when sitting down to pen such seeming “ready-mades,” we often find that they don’t come to life, drag, or simply seem to lose their once brilliant shine when committed to paper. So, we ask, how do writers such as Bill Bryson, Jon Krakauer, and Sebastian Junger write such engaging narratives? Or Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, and Tobias Wolff? This class will examine a variety of nonfiction forms, from the memoir to the specific-subject yarn drawn from a decades-old once-hot news item. We’ll discuss the two major necessities of writing successful nonfiction, compression and conflation, and how to use both with integrity and confidence, along with a host of powerful techniques drawn from fiction. Participants will write and share with the class a variety of exercises that develop core craft for nonfiction narrative. By the end of the class, all members will see the world of story in a fresh and inviting way, and that the story is in the telling. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

46 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Jeremy Jones

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014), which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book of the Year awards in memoir. His essays appear in Oxford American, Brevity, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the M.F.A. program at The University of Iowa, Jeremy is an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University. He also serves as co-editor of the nonfiction book series In Place, published by Vandalia Press (the creative imprint of West Virginia University Press).

More than Memoir Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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The memoir form often carries an unfortunate and limiting reputation as navel-gazing and dreary. Of course, the best memoirs do much more than meticulously document a writer’s dark past: they open up wide-reaching subjects; they find the universal through the personal. This workshop will explore work by writers who successfully weave in other subjects—history, ornithology, geography, music, and more—in order to create artful and ambitious literary nonfiction. Participants will discuss excerpts from such multidimensional memoirs, looking for techniques to borrow. They will also take part in numerous writing exercises to generate new work and stretch out the scope of any current projects. At the end of the week, we will share our writing together in a workshop focused on future possibilities for our projects. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Writing about Nowhere Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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This course will examine the rich tradition of nonfiction writing about place; however, it will immediately

detour onto the road less traveled. We don’t all have stories of Paris or Kilimanjaro. Some of us care about Key to Genres Paducah or desolate prairies. What does a writer need to capture the tiny towns and empty spaces, the AG All Genres everyday Main Streets and failing factories to create engaging, layered essays that reach far-flung readers? l lC Children’s By exploring useful gazes, forms, and examples, we will write about the places we have: the tiny Caribbean lE Essay town you backpacked through, the barbershop your grandfather visited every Monday morning, the lF Fiction junkyard full of feral cats just down the street. We will also discuss journals and magazines interested in lHF Hybrid Forms this writing about the common place. The instructor will give a prompt in advance of the workshop so that lM Memoir students will arrive with pieces to share with the group. In this workshop we will generate new writing lNF Nonfiction through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home. lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

47 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Margaret LeMay

Margaret LeMay has taught creative writing at The University of Iowa, The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Coe College, Des Moines University, the East Harlem Tutorial Project, and elsewhere. She is the founding director of the Examined Life Conference and the Writing and Humanities Program at the Carver College of Medicine. Her poems have appeared in publications that include Another Chicago Magazine, the Asian Pacific American Journal, Better, The Cortland Review, Little Village, and Transom, and her work was among semi-finalists for the Discovery/Boston Review prize and finalists for the Four Way Books Levis Prize. Her poem “The Heart Wakes Into” served as title and six movement subtitles for a piano quintet commissioned by and performed at the Library of Congress. She has joined the Festival as a graduate assistant, weekend session coordinator, van-driver coordinator, Eleventh Hour lecture series curator, associate director, and friend over almost two decades. Margaret holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. in poetry writing from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Writing Health: A Multi-Genre Generative Weekend Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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Whether we are healthcare providers, patients, parents, children, loved ones, or loving ones; elements of illness, loss, birth, healing, and health underlie our days at each age and stage. In this generative workshop, we will read and write in short forms with the unifying theme of illness and health. These forms will include short stories, lyric essays, memoir, poems, and creative works that incorporate elements of all of those. Our emphasis will be on a collaborative, inclusive, multi-genre approach, both in the sense of our source readings and as reflective of the multi-dimensional roles in and measures of health and care each of us holds. This course is appropriate for writers from beginning to advanced. In our weekend together, we will read, we will discuss the readings, you will write from reading-inspired prompts that I will provide, and we will discuss what we’ve written. You will also have the option but not requirement to a) suggest a short reading in any literary genre related to health that we’ll discuss in the course of our time, and b) bring something you’ve penned or tapped out on this theme prior to our two days together for our workshop discussion. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Short Forms in Flight: A Multi-Genre Generative Weekend Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Are you a writer who writes in brief moments of inspiration? These might manifest in poems, prose poems, blog posts, memoir, biography, or short lyric or personal essays. Perhaps you pen or tap out concoctions that integrate elements of all of those that you don’t know how to define, but you know they’re short. Or you’re a beginning writer who is interested in learning how innovative use of form can concentrate meaning and impact in any writing, how to use white space, and how to say more in fewer words. Come join us for a weekend workshop of inspiration, conversation, and collaboration. This workshop will be energetic, supportive, and generative. Writers from all genres and of all levels of experience who

48 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

are interested in the creative spaces that lie in between; in breaking down, evading, or recasting genre classification; or just in writing short pieces because time and they are short are encouraged to join us. We will read a wide range of voices and short forms, and we will discuss foundational elements of craft with a focus on shape, sound, diction, cadence, and image. We will then try our hands at integrating the elements we’ve discussed, and we will discuss those writings in workshop. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

BK Loren

BK Loren’s novel Theft won the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award, the Willa Literary Award, and the Dana Award for the novel, and was a finalist in many other national contests. Her collection of essays, Animal, Mineral, Radical, won the Colorado Book Award, and essays in the book have garnered numerous fellowships and awards on their own. Her shorter works have appeared in Orion Magazine, Parabola, and the Best Spiritual Writing of 2012, among others. She teaches internationally at universities, conferences and festivals. She attended The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she looks forward to her time in Iowa City with aspiring writers and friends.

Author as Architect: Radical Revision of Fiction and Nonfiction Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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A novel, story, memoir, or essay—whatever form you choose—is a three-dimensional space the reader enters upon reading the first word. At least, it should be. We get stuck when we see our work as words on a page, and the revision process suffers from this flat approach. Come to this class with a problematic chapter, story, or essay, and be prepared to re-see your work, to discover overlooked possibilities, to reinvigorate your passion, to take a flat piece of writing and raze it, and then raise it—like the walls of a beautiful structure that envelop your reader in place, idea, image, heart, mind, wholeness. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend. Key to Genres

lAG All Genres Word Yoga: Exercises to Invite Your Words to Stretch, Focus, Breathe lC Children’s Weeklong Workshop July 21-26 lE Essay lF Fiction HF Hybrid Forms lAG lE lF lHF lM lN lNF lSS l lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction Is your writing a little stiff? Does it need to take a breath? Or is it not as strong as you want it to be, or as lN Novel balanced and flexible? This generative class will offer numerous exercises to strengthen your writing lPW Playwriting while also making your words more flexible and “natural” on the page. Plan on writing a lot, learning a lP Poetry lot, and because yoga-writing is a mind-body experience, also plan on learning a bit of brain science as it lSS Short Story applies to your writing. This is not a workshop. No need to bring copies of your writing to class, though lYA Young Adult

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BK Loren we will share work voluntarily in our week together. Just as yoga strengthens your core, Word Yoga will (continued) strengthen the core of your fiction or nonfiction—and you won’t have to roll around on the floor, stand on one leg, chant, or break a sweat. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; Provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. For The Paris Review she writes a monthly column on fairytales and raising boys entitled HAPPILY. Sabrina earned an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has taught at Agnes Scott College, University of Georgia, Rutgers University, The University of Iowa, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Goldwater Hospital and throughout the New York City and Iowa Public School Systems. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. You can read more about her at sabrinaorahmark.com.

Writing the Chimera: A Workshop on Hybrid Forms Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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‘“Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.’” —Lewis Carroll (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

A chimera is a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve. Beginning with the prose poem, we will study forms that have the head of one animal and the body of another. We will study how form can swell and go frail, grow wooly and then grow smooth. We will study forms who forget themselves midway, who speak multiple languages, and who possess kaleidoscopic vision. Forms Key to Genres we will look at will include the prose poem, flash fiction, the lyric essay, the epistolary, the fragment, and lAG All Genres the comic. This generative workshop will provide in-class writing exercises and overnight assignments. lC Children’s Participants will have at least two opportunities to workshop new writing. Open to all levels. Open to lE Essay anyone who wishes to make the impossible possible. In this workshop we will generate new writing lF Fiction through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in lHF Hybrid Forms our week. lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

50 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Jacqueline Briggs Martin

Jacqueline Briggs Martin is the author of nineteen picture books for children, including Snowflake Bentley, which received a Caldecott medal in 1999. In 2018, Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Re-mix (co-written with June Jo Lee) was named an Orbis Pictus Honor Book by the NCTE and a Sibert Honor Book by the ALA. Creekfinding: A True Story received the Green Earth Award for Environmental Writing for Children. Her books have appeared on Smithsonian Magazine’s and Kirkus Review’s “Best Book” lists; won a Golden Kite Honor Award; been selected three times for the Lupine Award from the Maine Library Association, and been named four times to the Blue Ribbon List of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. Martin is currently on the faculty at Hamline University’s Low Residency M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She lives in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

Setting the Stage for Wonder: Magic and Mystery in Children’s Picture Books Weekend Workshop July 20-21 (With Sarah Sadie Busse)

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Charles DeLint has written, “When you are touched by magic, nothing’s ever quite the same again.” During our time together, we will explore how to create stories that bring a touch of wonder, magic, to our readers. How do we set the stage for wonder? How do we balance that wonder/that magic with the story’s reality? In this workshop for picture book writers of all levels, we will consider how we can include the uncanny, the inexplicable, in our writing and yet tell a satisfying story. We will look at how we can create stories that leave the reader pondering. We’ll use what we discover to strengthen our own work—perhaps with a touch of wonder, a touch of magic or mystery. Plan to bring copies of your picture book manuscript (800 words or fewer) to share in workshop. The emphasis of our weekend’s work will be on process, as we learn, through critique and conversation, how to deepen our stories and our poems. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home; generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Malinda McCollum

Malinda McCollum is the author of The Surprising Place, winner of the 2017 Juniper Prize in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, and Epoch, and been anthologized in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems and The Worst Years of Your Life.

Five Day MFA: A Fiction Workshop Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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Writing can be a solitary and frustrating endeavor. It’s one reason many writers enroll in M.F.A. creative writing programs: to be part of a vibrant literary scene. Of course, not everyone can drop everything to pursue a multi-year M.F.A. With that in mind, this workshop is designed to give you a concentrated

51 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Malinda McCollum version of the close reading and community you might find in a creative writing graduate program. We’ll (continued) engage in intense, extended discussions of each writer’s story (or novel chapter), offering thorough and thoughtful feedback as a way of challenging each other and ourselves. We’ll also do short readings and generative writing exercises throughout the week, based on the pieces class members submit. By the end of our workshop, you’ll have revision ideas for existing work, sketches to evolve into new work, and connections with fellow writers and readers that may continue beyond your time in Iowa. Writers should be prepared to electronically share one short story—or a self-contained novel chapter or excerpt—with the instructor before our week together begins. This workshop is open to short story writers and novelists at all levels of experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

James McKean

James McKean (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Ph.D., The University of Iowa) writes nonfiction and poetry. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest among others, and have been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His nonfiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Gettysburg Review, and The Iowa Review, and his essays have been reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing 2003 and the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology. He has published three books of poems, Headlong (1987), Tree of Heaven (1995) and We Are the Bus (2011), and two book of essays, Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports (2005) and Bound, recently published by Truman State University Press. A Professor Emeritus at Mount Mercy University, he still teaches for the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program, the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop and, most recently, as a visiting professor in The University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.

Memoir: Pieces for the Whole Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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This workshop is based on the premise that the whole story is made up of parts, that writing a memoir starts with a compilation of many pieces—episodes or anecdotes or vignettes or moments held in memory. Designed for those who are in the process of connecting these moments, this workshop will look at ways to “fashion a text” as Annie Dillard says, from “fragmentary patches of color and feeling,” especially for those trying to write about family with its many competing voices. We will look at form inherent in our material, the narrative potential in family artifacts, as well as explore vividness in language and detail. We will spend some time looking at short nonfiction examples to discover the possibility of form and narrative structure. But the majority of the workshop will be given to the reading of your work by an informed and sympathetic audience so that you might take from our workshop new strategies to develop your memoirs. Please bring two short pieces of work in progress, a variety of questions, and a curiosity about how all this is done. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

52 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

June Melby

June Melby is the author of My Family and Other Hazards (Henry Holt & Co., 2014), a memoir about a retro 1950s miniature golf course that her family ran for 30 years. It was a New York Times Best Seller and won the Midwest Connections Award. A former standup comedian and performance poet, her work has appeared in Muse/A Journal, Forklift Ohio, Fugue, The Utne Reader, Water~Stone Review, Versal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, National Lampoon Magazine, and the LA Weekly, among others. As a spoken-word artist she has performed in major cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. She received an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa, and currently lives in the woods with her husband and a twenty- pound cat named Ferdinand Magellan.

A Hedonistic Week of Creative Indulgence (For Your Muse) Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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You’ve finally carved out some time in your life to write. You have a bunch of great ideas, maybe even a new desk. But when you sit down to write, your muse refuses to speak. Or the muse gets you started, and then disappears completely, leaving you high and dry. Should you give up? Move on to a different project? Are you just not talented enough? Is there a secret that successful authors have to keep their muses on the job? This course is a fun, low-pressure mix of creative exercises, mini-lectures, and discussion, all aimed at helping you become your most creative self. We will study the habits of great authors. We will explore the rare occurrence of feeling “in the zone,” when words magically seem to flow, then we’ll experiment with ways to get you in the zone more often. Topics will include writer’s block, starting new work, and how to continue, even when your muse is on hiatus. Each day there will be new (and sometimes unusual!) prompts, designed to wake up your muse. You will have the opportunity to share new writing with your classmates. At the end the week you’ll have a notebook full of strategies and the beginnings of many new stories and essays. We’ll have fun. Your muse will too. This class has been successful for beginners as well as for advanced writers with M.F.A.s and novels-in-progress. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Key to Genres

lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

53 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Michael Morse

Michael Morse teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and has taught at The University of Iowa and The New School. His first book, Void and Compensation, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has published poems in various journals—including A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, Field, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares—and in anthologies that include The Best American Poetry 2012 and Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days. Honors include fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a poetry editor for The Literary Review.

Revisionist Singing—Walking Your Poems through the Ages Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau re-imagines one brief narrative in 99 different versions. We won’t get that obsessive in our weekend together, but we will read a number of poets from different “schools” and carefully listen to different modes of expression that can help us re-work our own poems. How might Romantic, Modernist, Confessional, Objectivist, New York School, and Oulipo voices help us to see our subjects and our language differently? Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with these various schools of expression—just know that we’ll use a playful variety of syntactical, musical, and rhetorical strategies to revise our poems, trusting our eyes and ears to take in and learn from what others have done over time. Lively discussions of individual poems and major poetic movements, along with liberating and exploratory exercises, will inspire us to revisit our own work. Plan on bringing three lyric poems of your own with you that you’d like to re-envision in multiple ways. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Think Twice/Think Again—Making Poems from Inspiration & Calculation Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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We’ll spend a week together generating poems, and each day we’ll playfully start something new together. Each session will begin with calculated yet playful springboards into writing: we’ll consider the work of two poets (one contemporary poet & one pre-20th century poet), a mythological tale, visual art, a rhetorical trope, and even idioms and song lyrics. We’ll take these calculated moves and then re-work them, adding whatever inspiration you might bring from personal experience and your own passions. Inspiration and calculation will help us create more textured, layered, and seriously playful poems. Expect daily in-class writing exercises, optional take home assignments, readings from a class packet of poems, and, towards week’s end, supportive group discussions of the work you generate. A great introduction for beginning poets or experienced poets looking to jump-start their work. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

54 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Workshops by Instructor

Marc Nieson

Marc Nieson is a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir, Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape, came out from Ice Cube Press in 2016. He’s won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, Houdini’s Heirs. Learn more about Marc at marcnieson.com.

Writing the Short Story—Love Letters Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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“The best literature is always about matters of the human heart,” Larry Brown posited. And it’s true, certain tales are more moving than others. You look up from their last page startled to remember your life—the one you now must return to—as somewhat strange and distant. Or, as perhaps more familiar and treasured than you ever realized. How do some stories achieve such rare imprints of dislocation and connection? Amazing us or haunting us, touching us, perhaps even shifting our perspectives on what is real? And how can we, as writers of fictions, better fashion our narratives to similarly loom and linger within the minds and hearts of readers? This intensive workshop focuses on the nuts and bolts of what makes a story work both structurally and emotionally. On how to design and plumb for confluences of form and feeling. Thematically, we’ll concentrate on tales that involve the complex balancing act of interpersonal relationships—from confessions to obsessions, co-dependency to commitment, to the dating and divorcing, the jilted, the jealous, the hold ons and hold outs, and even those whose passions lean more toward country or creed. Through model readings we’ll trail how other authors have successfully given voice to both the heartbroken and heartened. Above all, we’ll share and consider our own works-in-progress with tender loving care—working toward more affecting words and missives. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

The Art of Metaphor Weekend Workshop June 22-23 Key to Genres lAG lE lF lN lP lSS lAG All Genres lC Children’s From Melville’s white whale to Walker’s color purple. Woolf’s lighthouse to Carver’s cathedral. Basho’s lE Essay pond. Frost’s forked path. Naipaul’s river bend. Whitehead’s underground railroad. We all recognize the lF Fiction precision and poignancy of these metaphors. Those crystalline choices their creators made to deeply lHF Hybrid Forms and simultaneously etch into our minds both image and meaning. As writers, how can we bring that kind lM Memoir of consciousness into the ongoing process of our own work? How can we make a single image signify lNF Nonfiction and resonate throughout our narratives, poems, essays? Through varied exercises and readings, this lN Novel PW weekend intensive offers a vibrant study and practice of this often overlooked though highly resonant l Playwriting P Poetry element of our craft. We’ll generate scads of new material, and capitalize on the opportunity to share and l SS Short Story receive some immediate feedback. This class is open and useful to writers of all genres and levels. In this l lYA Young Adult workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

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Derek Nnuro

Derek Nnuro is a Ghanaian-American fiction writer based in Iowa City. He is a graduate of the fiction program at The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a recipient of the Meta Rosenberg Memorial Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. He was awarded the Robert J. Schulze Fellowship in 2016 and is a recipient of a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation. He is working on a novel set in Ghana, West Africa; Houston, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia. He has taught novel writing at The University of Iowa.

Fire Up: Novel Engines Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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A common belief among writers is that we can’t know a novel’s appropriate first chapter until we’ve completed a full draft or two of the novel. Only after conceiving the whole does the writer truly know where and how to begin. While this might be the case, it does not mean that we should discard our linearity of thought. More often than not, we start writing from what, at the time, occurs to us as the most appropriate of beginnings. What, then, must we be conscious of in order to ensure that when we return to the beginning, we tweak rather than uproot? What elements make a novel’s opening pop? Is it the kind of pressure Ian McEwan applies on his characters in the first chapter of Atonement? Is it the mystery of Beloved’s opening lines? In this class, we will explore novel openings. We will learn ways in which the greats—McEwan, Morrison, Marquez, etc.— fired up their novels’ engines. Brazenly writing in conversation with these masters, we will fire up our own novels’ engines. We will also engage in another kind of conversation—the workshop. We will discuss in-class exercises and participants’ longer pieces. Elements we will consider in workshop include structure, plot, dialogue, characterization, theme, pacing, tone, and individual sentences. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Jude Nutter

Jude Nutter was born in North Yorkshire, England, and grew up near Hannover, in northern Germany. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and have received over 40 awards and grants. Her first book-length collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), winner of the Irish Listowel Prize, was published in 2002. The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press), her second collection, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. A third collection, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (University of Notre Dame Press), was awarded the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and voted Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Review in New York. In 2004-2005 she spent two months in Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation’s Writers and Artists Program. Jude’s fourth collection, Dead Reckoning, will be published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in the spring of 2020.

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Poetic Alchemy: From First Draft to Final Draft Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Poetry, like alchemy, is a process of experimentation, distillation, and transmutation; a mixture of courage, patience, skill and happenstance. This workshop takes to heart the idea of the alchemical journey and its willingness to commit to process in order to build skills, and poems, over time. We will explore and experiment with some of the “base metals” of craft (line/sentence/pacing, the image, the stanza, for example) and look closely at the relationship between poetic form, structure, and content. Because revising/re-visioning a poem is a vital, ongoing part of the poetic process, we will begin by sharing and discussing various re-visioning techniques. During this workshop, you will refine and distill rough poems and/or first drafts of poems brought from home or generated in class; with this in mind, you are encouraged to bring poems already in progress to work on in workshop; however, there will also be “homework” prompts (using model poems by master poets) that will enable you to generate new material. Through revision, readings, and discussion you will acquire more poetic tools and techniques with which to work your material, expanding and deepening its emotional reach; during workshop, you will begin to distill and refine your poems towards final drafts. Suitable for both beginners and poets with a working knowledge of basic craft techniques. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Walking in the Field of Words: Using the Natural Landscape in Poems Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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Barry Lopez claims that landscape is a “shaping force” and that our physical experience of the landscape is integral to the meaning of the landscape itself. Landscape, then, is internal as well as external, and there is an intimate relationship between the physical and emotional terrains. In this weekend workshop, we will explore the ways some modern European and American poets have used nature and the landscape, looking at a variety of poems by poets such as Richard Wilber, James Wright, Caitlin Cowan, Paul Celan, Jiri Ortin, Pattiann Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Ken Smith, Wilfred Owen, Ted Hughes, Andrew Feld, Henry Reed, Keith Althaus, Leslie Norris, Patricia K. Smith, and Gillian Clarke. Most of these poets are not what one would call traditional “nature poets,” and they have been chosen specifically because of this fact: Key to Genres they illustrate how many (if not all) poets use the natural world as a way to reveal and complicate larger human, ethical, political, and spiritual concerns. Through focused writing prompts, you will generate lAG All Genres your own lyric and/or narrative poems that use nature, landscape, and the natural world to embody the lC Children’s poem’s concern/s. On the level of craft, we will look closely at how line breaks, sequencing of images, and lE Essay F Fiction the music of the lines themselves help to carry the poem’s larger message or idea. Looking at the marriage l HF Hybrid Forms of form and content in this way will give you more tools and options as you craft your own poems. We will l lM Memoir workshop these new poems as well as “nature” poems you bring from home. Poets at all levels and work lNF Nonfiction at all stages are welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and lN Novel prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend. lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

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Beau O’Reilly

Beau O’Reilly is co-curator of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, a frequent contributor to This American Life, and a professor of playwriting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a founding member of the Curious Theater Branch (now in its 30th year), the Crooked Mouth band, and the humbly legendary Maestro Subgum & the Whole. The author of over 90 original plays, O’Reilly is also a working actor. In 2016, his play One Boppa: Two Acts was produced; he released a third album with the Crooked Mouth, loveloveloveloveSTOPlovelovelove on Uvulittle Records; and a short story was included in the compilation Chicagoese. A new play, Last Week, premiered in January 2017, and his play Tattered and Wincing was produced that year in May. O’Reilly has produced, curated, and directed work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, Steppenwolf Studio, and Links Hall, and he has been named one of Chicago theaters’ “most influential” a half-dozen times over the course of his career.

Finish the Thing! Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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So 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. I will throw my not inconsiderable psychic bulk and creative moxie into helping you FINISH THE THING. We will do it. We really will. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Writing the Two-Character Play: A Workshop on Making the One-Act Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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Working from the premise that the two-character play is the most difficult contemporary dramatic form to complete, and the observation that two-character pieces, also, are one of the most expedient forms to stage and produce, we will make a number of short plays over the course of the week, each one working with dialogue, setting, and the restrictions and freedoms of the two-character format. We will write for the first four days in workshop from prompts designed to get us to create from surprising places. We will read from plays by Edward Albee, Caryl Churchill, Chicago writers Jenny Magnus, and Mickle Maher. We will listen to our new work read aloud. We will chose one piece to present on the final day in a completed rough draft. Students will come away from the workshop with a sharper sense of dialogue, story, and completion. The workshop is open to all; beginning playwrights and experienced playwrights will benefit from this week! In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

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Lon Otto

Lon Otto (Ph.D., Indiana University) published his third collection of stories in fall 2015—A Man in Trouble, from Brighthorse Books. His previously published books are A Nest of Hooks (University of Iowa Press), winner of the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction; Cover Me (Coffee House Press); and the craft e-book Grit: Bringing Physical Reality into Imaginative Writing (Writers Workshop Press). His writing in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is in many anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize (Pushcart Press), American Fiction (New Rivers Press), Flash Fiction and Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton), Blink and Blink Again (Spout Press), Townships (University of Iowa Press), and Not Normal, Illinois (Indiana U. Press), and in the craft text Best Words, Best Order (St. Martin’s Press). Several of his stories have been broadcast on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He is professor emeritus at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught literature and creative writing for many years.

Flash Fictions, Prose Poems, Micro Memoirs Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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Without fretting over the boundaries separating these closely related genres, the class will focus on learning and putting into practice principles that allow extremely short narrative works to achieve great emotional, imaginative, and sensory power. Reading as a writer (itself a rewarding and essential activity), you will explore the techniques involved in a variety of published very short narratives in different genres. You will begin and employ a special kind of writer’s notebook, designed to bring to your workbench experiences and areas of expertise and knowledge that are invaluable resources for distinctive, powerful writing (in short or long forms). You will have the option of surveying longer pieces you have already written or are working on, looking for vivid, self-contained passages that can be extracted (copied, not cut), shaped, polished, and published on their own. Drawing on memory, attention, imagination, and technique, you will generate during the course of the week the first draft of four or five new pieces of potentially publishable writing—very short stories, prose poems, or brief memoirs. You will receive reader response to each of these pieces from the instructor and others in the workshop, and in turn you will practice responding usefully to your classmates’ new drafts. Although the workshop is not focused on genre labeling, we won’t ignore distinctions, either; we will stay alert to the particular demands and opportunities each genre presents and ask ourselves periodically whether a shift of genre might help a piece achieve its richest potential. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises Key to Genres and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week. lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay Deep Revision: Fiction & Narrative Nonfiction lF Fiction Weeklong Workshop June 16-21 lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lE lF lM lN lNF lSS lNF Nonfiction lN Novel As challenging as the completion of a draft is, the work of significant revision that follows can be equally lPW Playwriting daunting. This is not a matter of light housekeeping—dusting, polishing, tidying up. Very rarely that’s all lP Poetry a draft needs; normally something bigger needs to happen before a substantial piece of writing achieves lSS Short Story its full potential. Walls might need to be knocked down and rebuilt, new powerlines connected, skylights lYA Young Adult

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Lon Otto opened up. This is deep revision, exuberant work that demands courage and honesty and is most (continued) effectively accomplished with a deliberate strategy. Intended for writers working on a novel or a narrative nonfiction book such as a memoir or literary journalism, or a substantial short story or narrative essay, the workshop will introduce a range of revision techniques for achieving the emotional and technical clarity necessary to make the process efficient and even pleasurable. Through a series of exercises and thoughtful scrutiny of successful published writing, you will apply those techniques to selections from your draft, making them more convincing, engaging, coherent, and original. The class aims to develop practices that will help you successfully complete the revision of your current writing project, and that will sustain you throughout your career as a writer. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Writing a Child’s Perspective: Fiction, Memoir, & Poetry Weekend Workshop June 22-23

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This weekend workshop focuses on the challenges and resources of writing about childhood experience. (Childhood, for our purposes, runs from a person’s earliest memories to the threshold of young adulthood.) We will read published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poems that involve a child’s perspective, and we will explore the advantages and liabilities of various narrative points of view. We will use these insights to ask constructive questions about writing being worked on by members of the class. For instance, how sophisticated should the language be? How much understanding should be reflected? Who is the audience? What is the emotional and temporal distance between a particular childhood event and its narration? How can we avoid the swamps of condescension and cliché that surround many depictions of children’s experience? I will invite you to bring to the workshop one or more short story, essay, or poem drafts or a novel or memoir in progress that involves a child’s perspective, whether as narrator, point of view character, secondary figure, or the writer’s earlier self. We will discuss the particular challenges posed by the child’s perspective in a given piece, and you will do writing exercises designed to make that perspective as authentic, original, vivid, and engaging as possible. Some of the exercises might involve revisions of existing writing; others will generate new passages involving a child’s perspective. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Tricia Park

Tricia Park is a concert violinist and writer. The recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, she has appeared in concert on five continents. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of MusicIC, an Iowa City-based festival that explores the connections between music and literature. She is the founding member of the award-winning Solera Quartet, recently praised as “intoxicating” by The New York Times. She also plays in the violin-fiddle duo Tricia & Taylor and is the producer/host of a podcast called “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia is a graduate of the Juilliard School and received an M.F.A. from the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Alyss, and F Newsmagazine.

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The Art of Unbalance: Using Disequilibrium and Vulnerability to Deepen Your Writing Key to Genres

Weekend Workshop July 13-14 lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE lF lHF lM lNF lE Essay lF Fiction For many of us, the challenge is not getting to the writing desk but knowing what to do with ourselves lHF Hybrid Forms once we’re there. What does it mean to develop a writing practice? How do we create momentum from lM Memoir where we are right now? What if destabilizing ourselves as writers could move us forward in our work, if lNF Nonfiction experimentation and play catapulted us into our best writing? As a classically trained violinist, I spent lN Novel years looking for the “correct” way, endlessly seeking the most efficient path, setting myself upright if lPW Playwriting I began to wobble. The truth of the matter is that all of us—writers, artists, musicians—enter into the lP Poetry creative process from a place of instability. Our objective should not be to straighten up and fly right, but lSS Short Story to embrace that physics and allow our work into it. In this class, we won’t try to fix what isn’t broken. lYA Young Adult We’ll hold our vulnerability and begin creating from where we are. We’ll give ourselves permission to commence, no matter how fragile the surface under our feet feels. Together, we will enter and engage with the work as it begins to speak to us, and we’ll allow ourselves to follow that uncertainty and see where it takes us. Each session will include in-class generative exercises: playful explorations of Surrealist and experimental prompts, collaborative techniques, and a dive into the ekphrastic as we turn to works of art—both visual and musical—for inspiration. This workshop is open to prose writers of all levels. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Rachel Pastan

Rachel Pastan is the author of three novels. Alena (2014) was named an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and This Side of Married (2004) was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, but Lady of the Snakes (2008) is her favorite. Her short stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, Mademoiselle, The Georgia Review, and many other places. For several years she worked as Editor-at-Large for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she wrote a weekly blog, Miranda, about the life of the museum. Her current novel-in-progress is based on the life of the Nobel- prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. Pastan teaches fiction writing at Swarthmore College.

Experiment, Embellish, Enlarge: Revising Your Way into Story Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Often when we’re writing a story, we start at the beginning and try to get everything done at once: compelling plot, best point of view, engaging characters, beautiful images, and so on. Sometimes this works, but oftentimes it feels like so much to juggle that we get stuck, or don’t feel that the story we end up with is as rich as we’d like it to be. This class invites you to try a different approach. We’ll begin by writing a short (500 word) sketch, then expand it day by day while adding a new element—and not necessarily the obvious ones mentioned above! We will look to published models for inspiration, and we will help each other see what’s working, and

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Rachel Pastan what could work better, as we progress through our drafts. By the end of the week, your sketch should be (continued) transformed into a shapely, sturdy, and affecting work of fiction. You’ll also take home a new method for approaching writing, and some new perspectives on what a story can do. This workshop welcomes writers at all stages. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Fear and Loathing, and Sometimes Even Joy: Getting Emotion on the Page Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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Strong feeling is often what drives us to write. We want our reader to experience the sadness or outrage, the delight or sense of betrayal we feel when thinking about a fictional (or nonfictional) situation. But how do we do that, exactly? How do we tell a story that’s not cold, but that’s not melodramatic either? This class will offer exercises and prompts to explore a variety of ways to get emotion on the page. We will experiment with description, dialogue, action, and gesture, and also how we use language itself. For each technique, we will look at examples from the pros, discussing how a range of writers have tackled these challenges. At the end of the weekend, you’ll have several new tools in your tool belt, and you will have written some pages that can serve as a springboard for more complete works. Together we will strive to make our classmates cry, laugh, gasp, and maybe even tremble with fear. Useful for both beginning and more experienced writers in any prose genre. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Juliet Patterson

Recently named a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, Juliet Patterson is the recipient of fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Minneapolis-based Institute for Community and Cultural Development. She’s the author of two full-length books, Threnody, (Nightboat Books) and the Lambda Award finalist The Truant Lover (Nightboat Books). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in numerous magazines, and she’s also published two chapbooks (one prose and one poetry): Epilogue (Spout Press) and Dirge (Albion Books). Her most recent writing project, a memoir in progress entitled Sinkhole, was a 2017 finalist for a Loft-McKnight Award.

The Art of Description Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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“It sounds like a simple thing to 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 workshop, we’ll take refuge in the sensory experience found in some contemporary writing, 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

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external world, and what can it mean for our writing? Writers of all levels and genres are welcome. We Key to Genres will take a craft-based approach to your work and make a thorough investigation into elements of image lAG All Genres and description. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; lC Children’s provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week. lE Essay lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms A Broken Thing: The Poetic Line lM Memoir Weekend Workshop July 27-28 lNF Nonfiction lN Novel P l lPW Playwriting lP Poetry This workshop will focus on a variety of exercises designed to underscore the multiple functions of the lSS Short Story line in poetry. What’s the primary function of the line in your work? And how can you utilize the line to its lYA Young Adult fullest? How can the line affect music, drama, and meaning or all of these in our poems? As a group, we’ll also discuss the pitfalls and frustrations each of us has with our own work in relation to the line and work together to dream up solutions to these problems. Hopefully, by the end of our time together you will have discovered at least one or two strategies for strengthening line work and line breaks in your poems. This will be a highly generative class: come prepared to do a lot of revising and writing! In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

Martin Pousson

Martin Pousson is a Creative Writing professor at California State University Northridge in Los Angeles. He earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia University, where he won the inaugural School of the Arts Dean’s Fellowship Award. He has taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and Loyola University in New Orleans. His first novel, No Place, Louisiana, was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and his first collection of poetry, Sugar, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. His second novel, Black Sheep Boy, won the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and it was a shortlist finalist for the Simpson Family Literary Prize. The novel-in-stories also was featured on NPR’s The Reading Life, as a Los Angeles Times Literary Pick and a Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Book. Stories from Black Sheep Boy were selected for the annual Best Gay Stories and Best Gay Speculative Fiction anthologies and were finalists for both the Glimmer Train Open and Very Short Fiction Awards.

Freeze Frame: Writing the Very Short Story Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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What is the difference between miniatures, drabbles, micro-fiction, palm stories, twitterature, and short shorts? In turn, how are these forms different from flash fiction, sudden fiction, and very short fiction? Is the answer more quantitative than qualitative, or does the selection of a frame—and form— change more than the number of words within a story? Increasingly, literary magazines promote

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Martin Pousson contests in shorter and shorter narrative forms to feature on smart phones, tablets, and social media (continued) sites. Writing to scale, to fit into form, may offer writers a swifter path to publication, yet each scale- down also requires a quick evolution in strategy and technique. This course will investigate the array of frames and forms in the ever-expanding house of fiction. Just as there is no true “free verse” in poetry, there is no free form in fiction. However, there is a freeze frame. For certain contests and publications, a writer cannot exceed an allotted length, whether 150, 1000, or 2500 words. The first choice for the writer then is to select the frame. The second choice is to submit to it. The third? The class will make that discovery together, with two chief experiments in constraint: writing a 150-word story forward into a 1000-word frame then writing a 1000-word story backward into a 150-word frame. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Link Letters: Writing the Novel-in-Stories Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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What is the difference between a linked collection of stories and a novel-in-stories? Are these merely new terms for old forms, or is a new direction now possible for writers? Increasingly, a once contested category is becoming more accepted and more viable, with an in-between road to book publication cutting a way between the sometimes difficult-to-sell short story collection and the sometimes difficult-to-read novel. With the rise of scaled serial television shows and strip-format graphic novels, some publishers seek a similar model in fiction, stories within stories, whether a sequence of tales told by a single shared narrator or an assemblage of tales linked only by a shared theme or setting. The linkages offer the coherent appeal of a novel to the publisher, while the segments offer the cohesive appeal of a short story to the reader. With any in-between choice, though, both sides bear down as the writer buckles up. An interlocking set of stories told by one narrator must offer enough closure but not too much resolution, enough recurrence but not too much repetition. A thematically linked set of stories must offer both perpendicular and parallel movements, with more overlap than rerun, ultimately appearing more interwoven than interlocked. This class will generate concepts for both models, with outlines written for a more multiple linked collection of stories and a more singular novel-in-stories. The outlines will explore episodic versus progressive plots, and linear versus non-linear chronology. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017 / Picador 2018) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York

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Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her Key to Genres spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Follow her at @KathleenMrooney. lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay The Fantastic Mongrel: Getting Started on Prose Poetry lF Fiction Weekend Workshop July 13-14 lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir HF P ll lNF Nonfiction lN Novel Prose poetry is far more than just verse without line breaks. Borrowing from a variety of forms and genres, lPW Playwriting including questionnaires, conversations, dream narratives, and art installations like those of Joseph lP Poetry Cornell, these little blocks, patches, scraps, chunks, fragments—whatever you want to call them—are lSS Short Story tiny boxes that can contain big things. Through brief in-class readings by such authors as Ocean Vuong, lYA Young Adult Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Sabrina Orah Mark, Carol Guess, and many more, students will see how the prose poem represents an exciting intersection among nonfiction, fiction, drama and poetry. After discussing how these blocks are structured—and talking about where to read and submit these popular genre-bending forms—students will have the chance to do in-class writing exercises, and will walk out with rough drafts of a few prose poems that they can continue to hone, as well as with a new sense of how to bring innovation to writing of all lengths and genres. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Sarah Saffian

Sarah Saffian (M.F.A., Columbia) is the author of Ithaka, her memoir of being an adoptee who was found by her birth family. Formerly a professor of journalism at NYU and the New School, and teacher of memoir at Sarah Lawrence, Sarah has written for publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Yoga Journal, and has been a writer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony. As a psychotherapist (LCSW, NYU), Sarah counsels individuals and groups, and blends her areas of interest and expertise in Therapeutic Writing, using memoir prompts as a tool for encouraging reflection, processing, and discovery. This is Sarah’s twelfth summer at the Festival. Please visit: saffian.com.

Advanced Memoir: The Art and Craft of the Personal Essay Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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In grappling with the cardinal question of memoir—Who cares?—this workshop zeroes in on what’s most compelling about our life stories. What about us is potentially interesting to others? Can a personal essay stand alone as a complete mini-memoir? We’ll read and discuss personal essays by Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Ariel Levy, and others, to enlighten and inspire us, and engage in some on-the-spot writing. Our main focus will be on a single personal essay all week—workshop, revise and expand, and share again. You’ll leave our week together with a piece in solid shape and resources for pursuing publication. Nothing to submit in advance, but so that we can hit the ground running, I ask that you come to Iowa with the

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Sarah Saffian first draft of a 500-word personal essay in hand, ready for workshop. Seasoned memoir writers aiming to (continued) publish in the short form are welcome (though previous publications aren’t required). In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

So What’s Your (Life) Story? Memoir in a Nutshell Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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In an effort to get over ourselves as personal storytellers, we’ll strive in this intensive course to make every sentence, indeed every word, count. What must be there for a reader to get a sense of us? What’s that inciting incident, organizing principle, heat-seeking moment, which could drive our memoirs? We’ll spend Saturday talking about how we all have many memoirs in us, but each needs to be a specific slice—the statue within the block of marble, the sculpture within the lump of clay, the story-within-the-story. What’s this particular memoir about? (“Me” or “My life” aren’t acceptable answers.) We’ll also engage in in-class writing exercises and discuss excerpts from published works—by personal writers such as Jeannette Walls and Karen Schneider—to energize and inspire us. Overnight, we’ll write our “life stories” in 500 words, to see what rises to the surface as crucial to include, allowing the narrower story to start to take shape. Sunday, we’ll share our pieces and workshop them on the spot. Nothing to submit in advance. Open- minded introspectives with a desire to communicate, at all levels of writing experience, are welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Zach Savich

Zach Savich is the author of six books of poetry, including Daybed, and two books of prose, including Diving Makes the Water Deep, a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Omnidawn’s Chapbook Award, and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, among other honors. His poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches in the B.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.

Old Poems, New Poems: Revising and Moving Forward Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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In this workshop, we’ll consider how new poems can grow out of close revision. In the first half of the session, we’ll discuss poems that participants have previously written—whether recently or many years ago. We’ll identify key poetic techniques and values in each piece, and we’ll practice methods of creative

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revision. In the second half of the session, participants will submit new poems that reflect our discussion Key to Genres of earlier work; the instructor will work with each participant to devise an individually meaningful lAG All Genres approach. Participants will leave with precise thoughts about revision and significant insights into lC Children’s where their poetry can go next, along with a thoroughly revised older poem, a draft of a new poem, and lE Essay many pieces that could be the basis for further work. We’ll also look at how other poets have approached lF Fiction revision in ways that take their work in new directions. This workshop is suitable for writers of all lHF Hybrid Forms backgrounds and levels of experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided lM Memoir exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing lNF Nonfiction you produce in our week. lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story Enhancing the Essay: Making Memoir Do More lYA Young Adult Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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Creative nonfiction is about more than what happened. In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to enhance essays, memoirs, and other forms of narrative nonfiction by using techniques that deepen our prose’s significance and resonance. We’ll take inspiration from a capacious range of essays, as well as from fiction, poetry, and other arts. Participants will complete new writing activities, receive feedback about past work they wish to share (optional), and discuss published works by diverse writers. Together, we’ll consider how the stories we tell can lead us to further insights—and more meaningful forms of telling. This workshop should be useful for writers who wish to start a new nonfiction project or to take a current project in new directions. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our weekend.

Suzanne Scanlon

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the novel Promising Young Women (2013) as well as Her 37th Year, An Index, which was chosen by Allan Gurganus for The Iowa Review fiction prize. Her fiction has appeared in many journals, including Bomb Magazine, The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, and DIAGRAM, and she writes about theater for the Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago. She is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, and was recently a Visiting Writer in Roosevelt University’s M.F.A. program.

Make It Strange—A Generative Workshop Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Whether fiction or memoir or something in between, many powerful works of literature are strange— structured in a fractured, fragmented, nonlinear style. In this class, we will read and write a lot. We will experiment with forms, styles, approaches to time, place, structure, point-of-view and character, finding

67 Suzanne Scanlon new and strange ways to tell (and retell) a story. Through in class writing prompts, we will construct a (continued) series of short pieces. Using models of contemporary fiction and nonfiction writers, we will read and discuss the ways that the gaps, the spaces between text, might propel narrative, expand character, and create a world. This class is open to writers of all genres and all levels of experience. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Writing as Resistance Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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What does it mean to write in a way that resists? Much of my favorite writing to read can be considered “resistant narratives”—writing 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 workshop, we will read and write. 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 possibility and resistance, taking the status of outsider and expanding the project of literature. This workshop focuses on generating new work while learning craft. In the course of the week, you will develop your storytelling techniques and writing skills through a series of guided assignments. It’s a place to try out a variety of forms. No experience needed, and poets, fiction writers, academics, journalists, and novices are all welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Polishing and Publishing Your Short Prose Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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Maybe you have a lot of work that’s almost, but not quite, done. Maybe you think you’re done but you don’t know what’s next. This workshop will help you get that story or essay or experimental prose piece ready to send out. You will bring in writing that’s close (but not yet!) done, and by the end of our weekend, you’ll have it polished and prepped for submission. We’ll spend some time looking at a range of options for publication geared to your writing style and genre. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our weekend.

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Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels that include Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award; a memoir, Occasions of Sin; a book of essays about family titled Mysteries of Love and Grief; and a recent book of stories, Swim: Stories of the Sixties. She has also written two craft books for fiction writers. The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer has helped thousands of writers since 2006. The Last Draft: The Novelist’s Guide to Revision (2017) is based on Sandra’s 25 years teaching at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Sandra is on the faculty of the low-residency Solstice M.F.A. Program at Pine Manor College. She is also an intrepid traveler, an avid painter, and a besotted grandmother.

All Those Pages: Talk about Your Novel Weekend Workshop June 15-16

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If you have written, are writing, or want to write a novel, you are thinking of All Those Pages. But the secret to a novel that flies is knowing exactly what it’s about, and being able to convey that succinctly. I call that “Aboutness.” An agent or editor needs it in a query. A reader will sense it and talk about it to others. Most of all, you need it as a North Star to guide your writing. And you will write it this weekend! You will learn to use a 9-slot plot template; a logline; and a summary map. You will describe your protagonist’s journey and define what is most meaningful about it. Sometimes you can’t see your way in or out of a manuscript draft; feedback and support (enthusiasm!) will help you keep going, finish, and unleash your work. Come with what you have so far. This will be a high-spirited, fast-paced, comradely weekend. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week/weekend.

Empowering the Novelist: Tools and Techniques to Guide You in a First Draft Weeklong Workshop June 16-21

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You have a story you are burning to tell. You’re carrying it around in you, but you haven’t even started. OR: You’re writing but you aren’t sure you can make it to the end. It’s prime time to learn key concepts, such as the difference between plot, chronology, and structure. What it means for a character to have agency. Key to Genres How to write a scene sequence. You don’t have to do these things in lockstep with the order of your story. AG You can roam the narrative to test the strength of events and the logic of the steps you take in telling them. l All Genres C Children’s You will build chronologies of foreground (“now”) and background (history). Learn the value of asking l E Essay “what if?” and “what next?” Test the power of scenes. Develop your protagonist’s struggle. If you have little l lF Fiction written, don’t worry; we’ll all “practice” on the first day, using an autobiographical exercise to learn basic lHF Hybrid Forms concepts. You will write every morning and read (share) and talk all afternoon. You will accrue a portfolio lM Memoir of ideas, passages, questions, templates, and guidelines for continuing to write. Like the cook going to lNF Nonfiction chef school and learning about meringues and sautéing, you will march through a basic curriculum for lN Novel the novelist, with hands-on practice, generous feedback, the solidarity of a group, and the sheer delight lPW Playwriting of diving in where the water’s great. You should leave with a solid sense of just what your story is and how lP Poetry you want to tell it; good drafts of key passages; and the skill-set that you need to plunge ahead. In this lSS Short Story workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts. lYA Young Adult

69 Sandra Scofield Agency, Struggle, and Transformation of Character in the Novel (continued) Weeklong Workshop June 23-28

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Agency is the word for a character’s central role in pushing a story forward. Often a first draft traps us in a story with characters who are passive, or who just can’t figure out what to do next. But responsibility for one’s own fate is a big part of making a character sympathetic. How do you develop your protagonist’s agency, especially if your character is in trouble? You build character struggle that comes from obstacles between what is desired and what seems possible. You upset the equilibrium and put good things at risk. Does every novel have to be about a hero? Absolutely not. Characters can fail and still become, just as characters can achieve but discover they have lost their true selves. But all protagonists have to try hard. In this workshop, we will look at your manuscript draft (or a comprehensive outline) and assess plot points in terms of agency, struggle, and transformation, that is, the role of the protagonist. Our discussions will be intense, lively, and above all, productive. You will write (or revise) and share scenes and summaries that deepen the meaning and function of your protagonist’s journey. You’ll need a solid summary or chapter outline and at least the first couple of chapters. More is better, but the pages don’t have to be perfect, or even “great” at this point. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Memoir Manuscript Workshop Two-Week Intensive Workshop July 14-26

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This workshop is a rare opportunity to give and receive feedback on book-length manuscripts. There will be ten participants. Admission is by application only. To apply, submit 15 pp/@4500 words. If your excerpt is taken from a chapter longer than the specified pages, you may append a one paragraph summary. Also submit a synopsis, with a word-limit of 1000 words, and submit a one-page statement saying what you hope to achieve by being in the workshop. Your synopsis should make clear what the situation and the story of your memoir are—a concept we owe to Vivian Gornick’s book of that title.

The deadline to apply is April 9. You will be notified of decisions by April 26. See Registration Information, page 85, for further details specific to Two-Week Intensive Workshops.

Life-writing is a venerable and significant endeavor, good for the writer and for the culture, whether it is published or not. We do well to remember and reflect, so that we can understand the trajectory of our lives. Memoir is a specific kind of life-writing, in which our memories are explored and refined and focused so that a particular event or phase of life is developed narratively; and both what happened and what it meant are shared with the reader. Such writing requires great tenacity, courage, and labor, but it can be thrilling to write and to read. This intensive workshop is for those working on book-length memoirs. Generally, memoirs are similar to novels in structure, with an arc and chapters, but I would entertain the possibility of an essayist or narrator’s voice conveying experience and insight in connected pieces, as long as there is discovery and growth for the writer. (See Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping.) The goal is that you go home with a renewed commitment to your project, and an arsenal of strategies for strengthening your manuscript. I will talk about ethical considerations, but very little about publishing, except to give you advice about

70 preparing queries. Participants will submit manuscripts-in-progress of 50,000—60,000 words. Your manuscript, ideally, should comprise most of a completed draft. Each writer will receive feedback within a community of peers, hewing to guidelines that focus on structure, cohesion, scene quality, tension, and perhaps most of all, the development of a persona with a powerful story to tell. The emphasis will be on a generous, supportive, inquiring response by readers. We will not be a therapy group. We will not edit. I will share insights and strategies for revision, but most of our time will be spent with the manuscripts. There will be one-on-one conferences, too. Participants will read each other’s work in advance of the workshop. This means you will be committing to having a viable draft by May 14; and to reading nine manuscripts by the convening of the class in July.

Mary Kay Shanley

Mary Kay Shanley has 10 books that cross multiple genres, tapping into her skills as storyteller, essayist, historian and journalist. She Taught Me to Eat Artichokes, a little book about friendship, became a best- seller. An Iowa Author of the Year, Shanley has led writing groups forever. She also co-sponsors four-day reflective writing retreats throughout the Midwest, and presents programs on behalf of Humanities Iowa. They range from Writing the Obituary—Yours or Someone Else’s to Our State Fair—Iowa’s Blue Ribbon Story, an award-winner. She’s taught classes within the walls at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville—a life-changing experience. This is her twenty-first year with the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Mary Kay and her husband live in West Des Moines. Over a period of years, their three adult children relocated from Washington, DC, New York City and San Francisco to Los Angeles. This saves a lot of money when it’s time to go visit everyone. Still, there is this assumption that visiting parents pay for those dinners at nice restaurants.

Perspective in Your Memoir Weekend Workshop July 13-14 lM lN

Even before the first draft of a memoir is written—sometimes before the first sentence is written—a wave of doubt can sweep the writer out to sea. “What if,” you gulp, “people disagree with what I write?” It’ll probably happen for one simple reason: Your memoir is written from your perspective. You see, Key to Genres understand, remember and interpret the people, places and events that merge to become your story from lAG All Genres your vantage point. Others in your story see it from their vantage points, and these twains will not all meet. lC Children’s We’ll discuss how to approach this. We’ll also use in- and out-of-class writing exercises and assignments lE Essay to better understand the role of perspective. I ask for a writing sample ahead of time so I’ll be familiar lF Fiction with your style. You may also bring work from home to critique with fellow students. Whether you’re a lHF Hybrid Forms beginner or well into writing, this class will give you insight and move you forward. In this workshop we lM Memoir NF Nonfiction will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring l N Novel from home or produce in our weekend. l lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

71 Mary Kay Shanley Smaller Pictures Deliver Bigger, Better Stories (continued) Weekend Workshop July 27-28

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A common problem that plagues writers without a boatload of experience is attempting to tell your reader everything. All-At-Once. But what results is a lot of information that skims the surface. Period. That means your readers miss the richness of all those smaller-picture stories waiting beneath. Stories that harbor marvelous details and vibrant conversations, characters who unfold on the page, places rich and real. Stories strung together in a timely manner—one after another—deliver the heart and soul of your project. Together we’ll learn how to break a big story into segments, then fill each segment—each small picture—with quality writing. With patience and care, you’ll connect those smaller pictures into the complete story. I ask for a writing sample ahead of time so I’ll be familiar with your style. You may also bring work from home to critique with fellow students. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Ami Silber

Ami Silber is a multi-genre author, publishing under her own name as well as the pseudonyms Zoë Archer and Eva Leigh. She has published more than twenty novels in literary fiction and romance. Her novels have been nominated for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award and the RT Book Reviews Readers’ Choice Award, and they have won the OCC RWA Book Buyers Best Award. She received the Glimmer Train Press Short Story Award for New Writers. Her books have also been translated into numerous languages. She received her M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and holds an M.A. in Literature from UC San Diego, as well as a B.A. in Pre- and Early Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz. She lives in Central California with her husband. Learn more about Ami on the web at zoearcherbooks.com and www.evaleaighauthor.com.

What Every Fiction Writer Can Learn from Romance Novels Weeklong Workshop June 9-14

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Whether or not you read romance novels, there’s no denying it’s the most popular genre of fiction currently published. The Romance Writers of America has estimated that annual sales of romance in 2013 totaled $1.08 billion. Given its strength and endurance through decades of development, fiction writers of every genre can mine romance for valuable techniques to bring to their work. In this course, we will discuss and workshop elements of fictional craft such as plot, pacing, characterization, and dialogue, using romance novels as our foundational texts. A day of the workshop will also be spent on the business of writing and how to practically manage writing as a career. In our week, we will generate new writing as well as discuss work you bring from home. Advance reading of texts I will assign before the workshop is also recommended. Please note, you do not need to be familiar with romance novels to join the class, nor do you need to intend to write romance novels. We welcome writers of all fiction genres and subgenres. In

72 this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on Key to Genres writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week. lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay Selling Your Book: Elevator Pitches, Back Cover Copy, and Query Letters lF Fiction Weekend Workshop June 15-16 lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lF lN lNF Nonfiction lN Novel One of the most essential components of writing and selling fiction is how quickly and strongly you’re able lPW Playwriting to snare your audience. Ensuring you have a clear and exciting elevator pitch is one of the tools fiction lP Poetry authors need, not only for garnering outside interest in your work, but also as a means of strengthening lSS Short Story your own writing. In this workshop, we will discuss three components that assist us in selling our books lYA Young Adult to readers, agents, editors, and ourselves with highly-crafted, sharply-honed elevator pitches. We will also create back cover copy for our work. Finally, building on the back cover copy, we will draft the all- important query letters using strategies endorsed by successful agents. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our weekend.

Laurel Snyder

Laurel Snyder is the author of many books for young readers. Her most recent titles are Charlie and Mouse, which was awarded the Theodore Seuss Geisel Medal in 2018, and Orphan Island, which was long-listed for the National Book Award. Other titles have been recognized with an Orbis Pictus Honor, an E.B. White Honor, and the Sydney Taylor Award. In addition to writing for children, Laurel is a poet, essayist, and book reviewer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN online, The Iowa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Post Road, American Letters and Commentary, and she has been a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. Laurel currently teaches in the MFAC (Writing for Children and Young Adults) program at Hamline University, and lives with her family in Atlanta. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (and the Hamburg Inn #2), she’s very excited to return to Iowa City.

The Wild Rumpus: A Picture Book Workshop Weeklong Workshop July 21-26 lC

Have you ever flipped through a picture book and thought to yourself, “I could do that!” Have you ever tried? It’s tougher than it looks. A blend of poetry and prose, picture books are perhaps the most inventive popular literary form we have. You can do anything in a picture book if you do it well. From folk tales to metafiction—picture books are constantly evolving. But that makes it hard to know where to begin, and how to proceed. Picture books aren’t just about telling a story or teaching a lesson. They’re about capturing a voice or character in a few short words, collaborating with visual space, and sculpting sounds to leave a deep and lasting impression. In this workshop, we’ll read classic and contemporary picture

73 Laurel Snyder books together, and then create our own. In-class assignments will be matched to daily craft lessons, and (continued) students will explore a variety of structures and forms. The second half of each class will be devoted to workshop, and by the end of the week, students should have a portfolio of revised work. This class should appeal to poets as well as writers of fiction and nonfiction. In fact, the more diverse our community, the stronger the workshop will be. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Carol Spindel

Writer and activist Carol Spindel combines memoir, narrative nonfiction, and ethnography to explore a wide range of subjects. Her memoir of living in West Africa, In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove, is a New York Times Notable Book. Her nonfiction book Dancing at Halftime examines the controversy over American Indian-themed mascots in American sports. Her award-winning audio pieces have been heard on National Public Radio and her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including African Arts, Oxford American, Guernica, Cultural Anthropology, and the Chicago Tribune. She is a mentor with the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction and a longtime activist with ACLU of Illinois.

The Overstuffed Closet: A Weekend of Mini-Memoirs Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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We all lead multiple lives, so no wonder it’s difficult to write a single memoir. And when our own lives are the subject, we have far too many subsidiary characters and subplots and know way too many details about all of them. This makes wrestling our memories into coherent literary form a bit like trying to organize an overstuffed closet, except in literature we don’t have plastic tubs or garage sales. In this workshop, would-be memoirists don’t have to organize the whole closet or try to make everything fit a single narrative. In and out of class, you will respond to assignments designed to help you create short pieces about significant moments. Instead of trying to write one memoir, writers will begin a series of mini-memoirs to capture their multiple lives. All writers are welcome. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Finding Your Threads: Shaping and Structuring Nonfiction Weeklong Workshop July 14-19

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Annie Dillard famously said, “The writer of any work, and particularly any nonfiction work, must decide two crucial points: what to put in and what to leave out.” If you have a nonfiction or memoir project in progress, you probably agree. But you may be asking: how do I decide? I have all this material, but how do I shape it? Where do I begin and end? Which parts do I put in and which do I leave out? To find answers, we will focus on identifying three to five threads or themes that run all the way through each essay or book, creating a warp that unifies the writing and provides narrative structure. Once you have identified

74 your thematic threads, it will be easier to make the call—In or Out. Designed to help you step back and gain perspective on the process of structuring and completing a memoir or nonfiction project, this workshop is a place to explore structure through writing assignments and to get constructive feedback that clarifies the overarching goals and themes of your project. Don’t have a complete draft? Worried your project is some weird hybrid? No problem—write hard and bring what you’ve got. Join us to wrestle with structure, find unifying threads, experiment with narrative, and clarify your goals in good company. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Ian Stansel

Ian Stansel is the author of the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the short story collection Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous venues such as Ploughshares, Salon, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A native of the Chicago area, he holds an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, the writer Sarah Strickley, and their two daughters.

Starting (And Finishing) Your Novel Weeklong Workshop July 14-19 lF lN

In this workshop, we will look at first chapters of published novels, discussing strategies for engaging readers, setting tone, planting seeds of future plot points, developing characters, and generally writing captivating opening pages. We will also workshop student first chapters, analyzing them in the context of what we’ve learned from successfully published work. But an opening is just a start—we’ll also discuss what comes next. While all writing should be a process of discovery, for many writers a novel needs a bit more planning. So we will look at the relationships between present action and flashback, scene and exposition, plot and sub-plot, primary and secondary characters. We will practice outlining “structures” for our novels, and we’ll look at and discuss one another’s plans so that we can get an understanding of Key to Genres what the books will really look like in their finished forms. Finally, we’ll discuss strategies for creating a lAG All Genres daily writing practice and ways to combat procrastination so that you can actually finish your novel. My lC Children’s goal is that you will come out of this week with a solid idea of how your novel will begin and an equally lE Essay confident attitude toward the project as a whole. In this workshop we will generate new writing through lF Fiction guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on lHF Hybrid Forms writing you produce in our week. lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

75 Sarah Strickley

Sarah Anne Strickley is the author of Fall Together (Gold Wake Press, 2018). She’s a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, an Ohio Arts grant, a Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Oxford American, A Public Space, Witness, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, The Southeast Review, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. She teaches creative writing and serves as faculty editor of Miracle Monocle at the University of Louisville. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, the writer Ian Stansel, and their daughters.

Starting Your Novel Weekend Workshop July 13-14

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Every novel begins with a great idea, but not every great idea makes for a compelling novel. How do you know if your idea is strong enough to sustain a book-length work? What are the tried-and-true methods for transforming ideas into pages? In this weekend workshop, the focus will be carefully laying the groundwork for the composition of a novel. We’ll pre-write our way through our cast of characters, our major plot points, and our thematic concerns; we’ll learn the value of an outline; and we’ll experiment with voice and point of view. The focus of this workshop will be generative, but writers may bring extant materials to the table. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

Nurturing a Daily Writing Practice Weekend Workshop July 20-21

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As any writing instructor worth her salt will tell you, the key to developing as a writer is devoting your time and energy to the craft. But, as any busy budding writer might attest, that time can often be difficult to come by in the hustle and bustle of modern life. In this weekend workshop, writers will learn strategies for cultivating a healthy daily writing practice. The arrival of writing prompts in your inbox will challenge you to make the time in your everyday life for your creative ambitions; feedback from your peers will help you to sharpen your skills; and group discussions of a variety of different published works will help you to become more aware of the literary community that awaits you. The focus of this workshop will be generative, but writers may bring extant materials to the table. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our weekend.

76 Maxine Swann

Maxine Swann is the author of three novels, Flower Children, Serious Girls, and The Foreigners. She has received a Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters for “recent writing in book form that merits recognition for the quality of its prose style” and her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, O’Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and the series Selected Shorts. Her New York Times Magazine article “The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble” was chosen for Longform’s ”Most Entertaining of 2013,” and is currently being adapted into a feature film by FilmRites. She has taught creative writing at Barnard College in New York, in the M.F.A. Program at Queens University of Charlotte and at The Walrus School in Buenos Aires. Born in Pennsylvania, she has been living in Buenos Aires since 2001 and is a founding editor of the bilingual cultural magazine The Buenos Aires Review.

Pygmalion or Bringing Your Characters to Life Weeklong Workshop June 16-21 lF lN lSS

In one moment your character is a blurry outline on the page and in the next she comes vividly alive. How and why does this happen? And how can you learn as a writer to make it happen again and again? The goal of this workshop is to provide you with strategies to bring your characters alive. The benefits of vibrant characterization are multifold. A character who is alive can make a whole work breathe. One living character can breathe life into another. Moreover, a character who is vivid in your mind may begin to make his or her own demands, helping you steer your novel or story where it needs to go. This weeklong workshop is designed for fiction writers with varying levels of experience. While we will be looking at models of stellar characterization, the focus will be your own work. You will be asked to provide 5-10 pages that feature one of your characters, ideally in the form of 1) a character description and 2) a scene with your character. We’ll workshop your submissions early in the week and, during the remaining 2-3 days, you’ll generate fresh pages about your character, or characters, through in-class exercises and overnight assignments. You’ll go away from the workshop with a deeper understanding of how to revive a listless character or create a radiant new one from scratch. In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home or produce in our week.

Key to Genres Loosen Your Hand lAG All Genres Weekend Workshop June 22-23 lC Children’s lE Essay lF lN lSS lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms M Good writing is the fruit of both the conscious and the unconscious minds. Sometimes we forget this. We l Memoir NF Nonfiction privilege the intellect; we think that if we just think hard enough we can “figure this out.” Our hand grows l N Novel stiff, our writing forced. In fact, much of our best work is produced when we’re looking the other way. This l lPW Playwriting workshop is open to fiction writers of all levels who sometimes get stuck. We will discuss the reasons we lP Poetry may stiffen up and the methods great writers have used throughout history to “to tap into the flow.” Next, lSS Short Story we will work on loosening your own hand through a series of generative practices, from exercises inspired lYA Young Adult

77 Maxine Swann by the automatic writing of the Surrealists to copying out the work of writers you love. The goal of the (continued) workshop is to have you walk away with a kit of tricks and techniques to put into practice every time you seize up. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Anthony Varallo

Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2019, as well as four short story collections: This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize; Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Think of Me and I’ll Know, finalist for the Balcones Fiction Prize; and Everyone Was There, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. Currently he is Professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and serves as fiction editor of Crazyhorse.

Get In, Get Out, Go On: A Short Story and Novel Workshop Weeklong Workshop July 21-26

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Taking Raymond Carver’s advice as our point of departure (“Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.”) we will explore the virtues of writing short stories, short exercises, and other short forms, and the downside of “lingering” in fiction. We will operate as a traditional workshop, where we will discuss and critique work brought from home, but we will also complete several in-class exercises and prompts that will challenge us to go on to the next story: no dilly-dallying, no lollygagging, no time to plan things out in advance, no waiting around so long that our doubts have time to get the best of us, the way those doubts always do. We will also discuss the importance of having several short “read aloud” pieces in your repertoire, why it’s helpful to think of your story as an “exercise,” and why you should take every opportunity to present your work to an audience. Required: participants will bring copies of an original short story or novel chapter of 12-20 pages in length. In this workshop we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; provide feedback on writing you bring from home; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

78 Steven Wright

Steve Wright is a big fan of science fiction, fantasy, horror and magical realism. He earned his M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University and his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he won the graduate student writing award. He has taught creative writing at Madison College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won an award for excellence in teaching creative writing. His essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books. He recently completed his first novel, the Coyotes of Carthage, which is forthcoming from Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. He lives and works in Madison Wisconsin, where he both binges TV shows on Netflix and contemplates his next book.

Beyond Genre: The Art of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, and Horror Weeklong Workshop July 14-19 lF lN lSS lYA

Not every writer wants to build their own world, but a talent for building memorable worlds is what distinguishes great writers of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and horror. This workshop will be a supportive environment in which writers will receive substantive feedback on their works in progress. Writers at all stages are welcome, and we welcome writers working on fiction ranging from short stories to multi-volume epic sagas. Each writer will submit, at least, the first fifteen to twenty pages of their speculative fiction. These submissions will be the heart of the workshop. In each workshop, we’ll use these submissions to explore the fundamental craft elements, and we’ll delve deep into scene construction, character development, narrative pacing, and, of course, world building. We’ll also discuss finding a literary agent and publication. In the end, writers will leave with the tools necessary to enrich, revise, and share their work. Most of all, we’ll have a lot of fun! In this workshop we will provide feedback on writing you bring from home.

Key to Genres

lAG All Genres lC Children’s lE Essay lF Fiction lHF Hybrid Forms lM Memoir lNF Nonfiction lN Novel lPW Playwriting lP Poetry lSS Short Story lYA Young Adult

79 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Schedules The Eleventh Hour Goings-On Getting Here

Weeklong and Two-Week Schedule

Weeklong and two-week workshops begin Sunday evening with a light dinner, orientation, and the first class meeting. For the rest of the week, workshops meet each afternoon, Monday through Friday, from 2:00-5:00. Mornings are reserved for The Eleventh Hour Series, and for writing, revising, and annotating manuscripts in preparation for your workshop. Your conference with your instructor may be scheduled in this time, too.

Sunday 6:30–7:30 p .m . Registration and light dinner 7:30 p .m . Large-group orientation and welcome 8:00 p .m . First class meeting

Monday–Friday 7:30–11:00 a .m . Coffee and conversation downtown; time to write, read, critique manuscripts, and confer 11:00 a .m . The Eleventh Hour Lecture Series 2:00–5:00 p .m . Meet in workshop

Weeklong and two-week sessions include the following events: Monday, 5:30 p .m . Festival reception Wednesday, 7:00 p .m . Open Mic: readings by participants Thursday, 6:00 p .m . All-Festival dinner

Weekend Schedule

Saturday 8:30–9:30 a .m . Registration and light breakfast 9:30 a .m . Large-group orientation and welcome 10:00 a m. . Meet in workshop 12:00 Noon–2:00 p .m . Lunch on your own; read, write, critique manuscripts 2:00–4:00 p .m . Meet in workshop

Break for dinner on your own

7:00 p .m . Open Mic: Readings by participants

Sunday 9:00–11:00 a .m . Meet in workshop 11:00 a .m .–1:00 p .m . Lunch on your own; read, write, critique manuscripts 1:00–3:00 p .m . Meet in workshop

Note: It is possible to take a weeklong and weekend workshop in succession, and participants routinely do so. They do not overlap.

80 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Schedules The Eleventh Hour Goings-On Getting Here

The Eleventh Hour Series Goings-On

The Eleventh Hour Series is comprised of hour-long presentations Apart from the dedicated time and space to devote to your own at 11:00 a.m. each weekday of the Festival. The series features issues writing, one of the gifts you give yourself as a writer when you come of special interest to writers, including aspects of craft, process, here is the opportunity to meet and commune with others who are the writing life, and publishing. Recent talks have included “The kindred. Writer as Witness,” “Me, Myself, and I: The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction,” “Writing as Correspondence,” “Edit Like While the week is intense, we hope you’ll take time to step away from a Zen Master,” “Sending Work to Literary Magazines,” “The Video the page and experience the energy and ambiance of our community Essay,” and “How Poets See the World: The Art of Description.” in summer. Festival writers enjoy getting together in the mornings for coffee and conversation, as well as the reception after our first The Eleventh Hour features a different presenter each day. Specific full workshop Monday evening. Open Mic night is your opportunity descriptions are posted on our website when the Festival opens in to share your work with members of other workshops; the Thursday June. The Eleventh Hour is free and open to the public as well as night dinner gives us a chance to come together and decompress as Festival participants. we approach the end of the week.

To listen to podcasts of past lectures, visit The Writing University at Iowa City is extraordinarily friendly to writers. Readings by writinguniversity.org/. outstanding contemporary voices, hosted nearly every evening by Prairie Lights Books, are a favorite among locals and Festival participants alike. You’ll want to take time to lose yourself in Iowa City’s bookstores and literary haunts, to lollygag by the Iowa River, and to enjoy theater, film, and music downtown.

We post announcements of coming events continually throughout the summer on our webpage—uiowa.edu/iswfestival/—and on the Iowa Summer Writing Festival Facebook page—facebook.com/ iowasummerwritingfestival/.

Getting Here

Iowa City is easily accessible. If you are driving, you will find us just south of Interstate 80. The Eastern Iowa Regional Airport (CID) is located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about twenty miles north of Iowa City. Shuttle service is available from the airport. The Quad City International Airport (MLI) is located in Moline, Illinois, approximately 65 miles from Iowa City. Though not as close as the airport in Cedar Rapids, flights into Moline can be a value. Greyhound Bus service is available between Moline and Iowa City. There is no train service to Iowa City.

81 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Where to Stay

Where to Stay

There are numerous hotels and bed & breakfasts in the Iowa City/Coralville area. For a comprehensive list, visit the Iowa City/Coralville Convention & Visitors Bureau at iowacitycoralville.org and select “Lodging.”

The following properties offer special rates to Festival participants. To receive these rates, indicate that you are participating in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival when you make your reservation.

There may be weeks in which our block of rooms fills up quickly. We strongly encourage you to make your reservations early.

Iowa City Properties (within walking distance of Festival classrooms/venues)

Iowa House Graduate Iowa City hotelVetro Hyatt Place A limited number of rooms A limited number of rooms have A small block of rooms A block of rooms is available have been reserved at the been reserved at Graduate Iowa is available at hotelVetro at Hyatt Place Iowa City Iowa House, a hotel located on City on the pedestrian mall downtown, steps from the Downtown at a rate of $109 campus in the Iowa Memorial downtown (this space was once Iowa City Public Library. per night plus tax. Parking is Union. Rates are $95 per the Sheraton). The Graduate Rates are $129 per night plus available for $14.00 per night. night (tax is included). Iowa provides complimentary shuttle tax. To reserve, call 319-337- To reserve, call 319-569-2780 House offers complimentary service in and around the Iowa 4058. Indicate that you are and mention that you are continental breakfast, free City/Coralville area. Rates are participating in the Iowa attending the Iowa Summer parking, and wireless internet $109 plus tax per night. Rooms Summer Writing Festival. Writing Festival. You may access, as well as admission to include complimentary basic also reserve online. For June the Campus Recreation Center. internet access. Paid parking reservations, go to hyatt.com/ Rooms include microwaves is available in the nearby city en-US/hotel/iowa/hyatt- and refrigerators. To reserve, ramp. To reserve, call 319-337- place-iowa-city-downtwon/ call 319-335-3513, or book 4058 or 800-848-1335. Indicate iowzi?corp_id=G-SUMW; for online at iowahousehotel.com. that you are participating in the July reservations, go to hyatt. Enter 8956 in the group code Iowa Summer Writing Festival. com/en-US/hotel/iowa/hyatt- field. These rooms will be held These rooms will be held place-iowa-city-downtwon/ until three weeks before the until three weeks before the iowzi?corp_id=G-SUWR. This beginning of each session. beginning of each session. rate will be available until three weeks prior to the beginning of each session.

82 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form Where to Stay

Coralville Properties Other Housing Traveling Companions/ (a short car, bus, or taxi ride to campus) Sharing a Room

Heartland Inn Homewood Suites by Airbnb and craigslist both list If you are looking for a Rooms at the Heartland Inn, Hilton Coralville—Iowa rentals in the area. In addition, traveling companion to Iowa located in Coralville about two River Landing the Festival keeps a list of City, or you’re interested in miles from downtown Iowa Suites are available at alternative housing options as sharing housing costs during City, are $75 per night plus tax. Homewood Suites by Hilton we learn of them. These include your stay, join our Facebook They include a microwave oven in Coralville. Rates for Festival summer sublets and rooms in travel and housing forum— and refrigerator. The Heartland participants are $114 plus tax private homes, etc. Email us The Iowa Summer Writing offers complimentary breakfast (1-4 nights), $109 plus tax (5-29 at [email protected], and Festival Hovel—and post and evening snacks, wireless nights), and $99 (30+ nights). we’ll be happy to share these your inquiry: facebook.com/ internet access, free parking, Rates include a King Studio accommodations as we hear of groups/iowasummerwriting and an indoor swimming pool. Suite with fully equipped them. festivalhovel/. Free shuttle service to campus kitchen, complimentary wi-fi, at scheduled times is provided. hot breakfast buffet, dinner For more listings of summer To reserve, call 1-800-334-3277 (M-Th), and parking. Reserve sublets and properties with or 319-351-8132. Mention VIP online at homewoodsuites. short-term leases, check the code ISWF or indicate that you hilton.com, or call 319-338- Off-Campus Housing Services are participating in the Iowa 3410. Indicate that you are page on The University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. participating in the Iowa website: offcampushousing. Summer Writing Festival when uiowa.edu/property/rental/ Radisson Coralville you call. page/2. The Radisson Hotel in Coralville offers participants Home2 Suites by Hilton in the Festival a group rate of Iowa City-Coralville $94 plus tax per night. Guest Suites are also available at rooms include a microwave Home2 Suites by Hilton Iowa and refrigerator as well as City-Coralville, across from complimentary wireless Coral Ridge Mall. Rates for internet access. The onsite Festival participants are $89 restaurant serves breakfast, plus tax (1-4 nights), $84 plus lunch, dinner, and offers room tax (5-29 nights), and $79 (30+ service. Radisson guests enjoy nights). Rates include a 1 King free shuttle service, by request, bed or 2 Queen bed Studio Suite to locations in Iowa City, with fully equipped kitchen, free parking, and an indoor wi-fi, daily breakfast, parking, swimming pool and fitness on-site laundry, 24-hour fitness center. To reserve, call 319-351- center, and pool. Reserve online 5049 and using the group name at home2suites.com, or call Iowa Summer Writing Festival. 319-337-5011. Indicate that you Our group/promotional code is are participating in the Iowa SUMMER. Summer Writing Festival when you call.

83 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to participate. For a list of summer programs for youth at The University of Iowa, visit https://hr.uiowa.edu/family-services/university-iowa-summer-programs.

How to Register Deadlines

For questions regarding registration, contact the Center for Registrations for weeklong and weekend workshops are accepted on a Conferences at 319-335-4141 or 800-551-9029, or email first-come first-served basis. Class size is limited to twelve. It is a good [email protected]. idea to register early. We will notify you promptly if the workshop you have selected is full. If you do not wish to enroll in a second choice, we For questions regarding workshop content, or for help choosing a will refund your entire payment. workshop, call the Festival office at 319-335-4160. See “Skill Levels/ Choosing a Workshop” on page 2. Admission to two-week intensive workshops is by application only and limited to 10 registrants. The application deadline is April 9. Decisions All workshops are noncredit. Auditors or other nonparticipating are made by April 26. visitors are not permitted.

You may enroll in only one workshop per week or weekend. You may, however, enroll in as many weeks or weekends as you like. Fees Payment must accompany registration. Register online or by phone, fax, or mail with MasterCard, Visa, Discover, or American Express. Housing and most meal costs are not included in workshop fees. Checks or money orders are accepted with registrations in person Fees for weeklong workshops include a light dinner on the Sunday and by mail. evening of registration, a reception Monday evening, and dinner Thursday evening. Weekend fees include a Saturday morning Register online: centerforconferences.uiowa.edu/conferences. continental breakfast.

Register by phone: 319-335-4141 or 800-551-9029 A nonrefundable deposit is required for each course for which you register. Register by fax: 319-335-4039 Weeklong Workshop Register by mail: complete the registration form on pages 86–89, $705 if paid in full when you register. $275 of your payment is a indicating workshop(s) and including payment. Make checks or nonrefundable deposit. money orders payable to Center for Conferences. Mail to: Weeklong Workshop Installment Plan $725 if paid in two installments, $275 nonrefundable deposit when Center for Conferences you register and the remaining $450 ten days in advance of your The University of Iowa workshop. A schedule for payments due on the installment plan 250 CEF appears below. Iowa City, IA 52242

Weekend Workshop $365 payment in full when you register. $125 of your payment is a nonrefundable deposit. Receive $25 off one weekend workshop for every weeklong workshop in which you enroll. Discounts may not be transferred or combined.

84 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

Two-Week Intensive Workshop Terms: The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built Note that fee structures, deadlines, and refund policies for two-week on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual workshops differ from those described elsewhere. respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/ Total cost is $1985. A $985 nonrefundable deposit is due upon working environment of others or threatens this enterprise. In acceptance. addition, participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, including the Two-week workshops require a $35 nonrefundable submission University’s Policy on Sexual Harassment: https://opsmanual.uiowa. fee. If you are accepted into the workshop, this fee will be applied edu/community-policies/sexual-harassment. toward your tuition.

If you are not admitted to a two-week workshop and wish to register for something else, your $35 submission fee can be applied toward another workshop. If you apply for a two-week intensive workshop Weeklong/Weekend and want to register for another workshop as a back-up, you may. We will transfer your registration and apply your fees toward the two- Workshops Transfer Policy week workshop if you’re accepted. If you wish to transfer to another workshop after you have registered, Applications for the Novel and Memoir Manuscript Two-Week there will be a processing charge of $50 for each transfer, provided Intensive Workshops are due Tuesday, April 9, 2019. Pay your the transfer is at least ten days prior to the start date of your $35 submission fee by calling the Center for Conferences at 319- workshop. Thereafter, the charge to transfer is $150. Deadlines 335-4141, or via online registration at centerforconferences.uiowa. for transfers follow the schedule below. edu/conferences. Then email submission materials (detailed in the course description) to [email protected]. Please We are not able to make exceptions to the cancellation and include the workshop title (Novel or Memoir Manuscript Workshop) transfer policies. and your name in the subject line.

We will notify you of decisions for two-week intensive workshops Schedule for Refunds (Minus Deposit), $50 Transfers, and by Friday, April 26. If accepted, you must pay your nonrefundable Payments Due on Installment Plan deposit of $985 by Tuesday, May 7 to secure your spot. Full payment is due Tuesday, June 4. No refunds will be made after June 4.

If admitted to the two-week intensive workshop, plan to submit your If the workshop begins: You must cancel/transfer full manuscript to the instructor via email for distribution to fellow your registration/pay your workshop members no later than Tuesday, May 14. balance by 12:00 noon, Thursday: June 9 May 30 June 15 (weekend) June 6 Weeklong/Weekend June 16 June 6 Workshops Cancellation Policy June 22 (weekend) June 13 June 23 June 13 If you must cancel your registration, and the cancellation is at least July 13 (weekend) July 5 (Friday) ten days prior to the beginning of your workshop, we will refund your payment minus your deposit. You will forfeit your deposit for July 14 July 5 (Friday) each workshop for which you are registered and cancel. If you July 20 (weekend) July 11 must cancel within the ten days preceding your workshop for any July 21 July 11 reason, you will forfeit your entire payment. A schedule for refunds (minus nonrefundable deposits) appears below. July 27 (weekend) July 18

If we must cancel a workshop due to insufficient enrollments, we will do so at least three weeks before the workshop begins. You will have the opportunity to transfer to another workshop without penalty or cancel your registration and receive a full refund.

85 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

Weeklong Workshops June 16-21

I. Select Your Workshop(s) 19-167-01 !

Choose no more than one workshop per week or weekend. You ■ Amy Butcher Essay Bootcamp ■ may enroll in as many weeks or weekends as you’d like. Mieke Eerkens Picture This ■ Max Garland Familiarizing the Strange They do not overlap. ■ Eric Goodman The Final Draft ■ Sands Hall Fiction for Memoirists Weeklong Workshops June 9-14 ■ Christine Hemp Belonging: Nonfiction 19-160-01 ■ Jim Heynen From Memory to Art ■ Wayne Johnson Telling the Tale ■ Mary Allen Encountering Our Lives ■ Marc Nieson Writing the Short Story ■ Kate Aspengren Playwrights Workshop ■ Lon Otto Deep Revision ■ Thomas K . Dean Shaping Memoir & Essay ■ Sandra Scofield Empowering the Novelist ■ Hope Edelman Story beneath Your Story ■ Maxine Swann Pygmalion: Characters ■ Hugh Ferrer In Convincing Style ■ Vince Gotera Wilderness Map: Poetry ■ Wayne Johnson Novel Solutions ■ Derek Nnuro Fire Up: Novel Engines Weekend Workshops June 22-23 ■ Lon Otto Flash Fictions, Prose Poems 19-173-01 ■ Zach Savich Old Poems, New Poems ■ Ami Silber Learning from Romance ■ Marilyn Abildskov Trespassing Encouraged ■ Jonathan Blum Who Is I? ■ Amy Butcher The Literary Memoir ■ Kelly Dwyer Popular Novel Weekend Workshops June 15-16 ■ Mieke Eerkens Promptapalooza 19-166-01 ■ Hugh Ferrer Clock and Camera ■ Katie Ford Draft after Draft: Poems ■ Thomas K . Dean Revising Sentences ■ Allen Gee The M .F .A . Application ■ Hope Edelman Time and Place ■ Michael Morse Revisionist Singing: Poems ■ Mieke Eerkens Experimenting with Form ■ Marc Nieson The Art of Metaphor ■ Eric Goodman Write Funny to Me ■ Lon Otto Child’s Perspective ■ Vince Gotera Jazz June: Writing Poems ■ Maxine Swann Loosen Your Hand ■ Sands Hall Know Your Narrator ■ Christine Hemp Short-Short Nonfiction ■ Jim Heynen Writing Emotions Weeklong Workshops June 23-28 ■ Zach Savich Enhancing the Essay 19-174-01 ■ Sandra Scofield All Those Pages: Novel ■ Ami Silber Selling Your Book ■ Marilyn Abildskov You Are the Subject ■ Linda Bendorf Legacy as Memoir ■ Jonathan Blum Short Story Workshop ■ Kelly Dwyer Five Elements of Novel ■ Hugh Ferrer Inventing Memory ■ Katie Ford Advanced Poetry ■ Allen Gee Writing America ■ Cecile Goding Call and Response ■ James McKean Memoir ■ June Melby Creative Indulgence ■ Michael Morse Think Twice: Poems ■ Sandra Scofield Character in Novel

86 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

Weekend Workshops July 13-14 Weeklong Workshops July 21-26

! 19-194-01 19-202-02

■ Susan Aizenberg Working with Imagery ■ Susan Aizenberg Writing Alone Together ■ Mary Allen Writing from the Heart ■ Nancy K . Barry Revising Revision ■ Thomas Fox Averill Whats Happening: Plot ■ Robin Hemley The Frangible Memoir ■ Venise Berry Shades of Gray ■ Charles Holdefer The Balancing Act ■ Jennifer Fawcett Writing around the Edges ■ Naomi Jackson This Summer, Your Novel ■ Diana Goetsch Nonfiction Intensive ■ BK Loren Word Yoga ■ Tricia Park Art of Unbalance ■ Sabrina Orah Mark Writing the Chimera ■ Martin Pousson Freeze Frame: Story ■ Malinda McCollum Five Day MFA ■ Kathleen Rooney The Fantastic Mongrel ■ Beau O’Reilly Two-Character Play ■ Mary Kay Shanley Perspective in Memoir ■ Juliet Patterson The Art of Description ■ Carol Spindel The Overstuffed Closet ■ Sarah Saffian Advanced Memoir ■ Sarah Strickley Starting Your Novel ■ Suzanne Scanlon Writing as Resistance ■ Laurel Snyder The Wild Rumpus ■ Anthony Varallo Get In, Get Out, Go On Weeklong Workshops July 14-19 19-195-01 ■ Dorothy Barresi Identity Poetics Two-Week Intensive Workshops July 14-26 ■ Timothy Bascom Formed by Family 19-195-02, 19-195-03 ■ Tameka Cage Conley Time on My Side? ■ Kelly Dwyer Plotting the Novel ■ Amber Dermont Novel Manuscript ■ Jennifer Fawcett A Play in a Week ■ Sandra Scofield Memoir Manuscript ■ Diana Goetsch Free-Writing Intensive ■ Jeremy Jones More than Memoir ■ Jude Nutter Poetic Alchemy ■ Rachel Pastan Experiment, Embellish Weekend Workshops July 27-28 ■ Martin Pousson Novel-in-Stories 19-208-01 ■ Suzanne Scanlon Make It Strange ■ Nancy K . Barry Whose Voice Is This ■ Carol Spindel Finding Your Threads ■ Venise Berry Muddy Water: Plot ■ Ian Stansel Starting/Finishing Novel ■ Jennifer Colville Imagery for Prose ■ Steven Wright Beyond Genre ■ Tameka Cage Conley Poet-ing the Self ■ Cecile Goding After the Bell ■ Weekend Workshops July 20-21 Margaret LeMay Short Forms in Flight ■ 19-201-01 Juliet Patterson A Broken Thing: Line ■ Sarah Saffian What’s Your Story? ■ Timothy Bascom Inventive Nonfiction ■ Suzanne Scanlon Polishing/Publishing Prose ■ Venise Berry Writing Book Proposals ■ Mary Kay Shanley Smaller Pictures ■ Busse/Martin Setting the Stage ■ Kelly Dwyer Flash Fiction in a Flash ■ Jennifer Fawcett Solo Performance 101 ■ Diana Goetsch Five New Poems ■ Jeremy Jones Writing about Nowhere ■ Margaret LeMay Writing Health ■ BK Loren Author as Architect ■ Jude Nutter Landscape in Poems ■ Beau O’Reilly Finish the Thing! ■ Rachel Pastan Fear and Loathing ■ Sarah Strickley Nurturing Writing Practice

87 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

II. Tell Us About You !

Please type or print legibly.

______Your Name

______The University of Iowa prohibits discrimination in Street Address employment, educational programs, and activities on the basis of race, national origin, color, creed,

religion, sex, age, disability, veteran status, sexual ______pl e as e i nclud e t h i s page if you a re ma i l ng you r re orientation, gender identity, or associational City preference. The University also affirms its commitment to providing equal opportunities and equal access to University facilities. For additional ______information contact the Office of Equal Opportunity State/Province and Diversity, (319) 335-0705.

______Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to Zip/Postal Code attend all University of Iowa-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation in order to participate in the ______Festival, please contact the Center for Conferences Country in advance at 319-335-4141 or 800-551-9029, or email [email protected]. ______Daytime phone

______Evening phone g i s tr

______a Email address ti on.

88 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form

! III. Fees Included With This Registration

Number of weekend workshops ______x $365 = $______(Payment includes $125 nonrefundable deposit for each weekend workshop.)

Number of weeklong workshops at full payment ______x $705 paid now = $______(Payment includes $275 nonrefundable deposit for each weeklong workshop.)

Number of weeklong workshops on installment plan ______x $275 nonrefundable deposit paid now = $______plus $450 per workshop due ten days before your week begins .

Total cost on the installment plan is $725 per week . pl e as e i nclud e t h i s pag e if you a re ma i l ng your re

Application fee for TWO-WEEK INTENSIVE WORKSHOP ______x $35 = $______

(Subtotal) $______

Number of weekend workshop discounts ______x $25 = —$______

Total fees included with this registration Total $______

IV. Payment Information

■ Check or ■ Credit Card

Make check payable to Center for Conferences (Payment in U .S . dollars) g i s tr

a ■ MasterCard ■ VISA ■ Discover ■ American Express ti on. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■

Expiration Date______Name on card ______Security Code ■■■■

Billing address for this account if different from address above:

______

______

89 Iowa Summer Writing Festival Non-Profit Organization The University of Iowa U. S. Postage 250 Continuing Education Facility PAID Iowa City, IA 52242 U.I.C.C.I.

125 noncredit writing workshops across the genres • Open to adults 18 and over. Only requirement is the desire to write • Visit us at iowasummerwritingfestival.org/

THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

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