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. 2 Welcome The Workshop The Festival Experience Registration Information Registration Form 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 ............