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The Iowa Summer Writing Festival for 2023, taking place at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA from July 9, 2023 to July 28 2023.

Click HERE > to view the complete schedule of Summer workshops on campus by session date.

This workshop is for playwrights who have completed (at least) the first draft of a play of any length or who have a play that is nearing completion. Most of our time together will be devoted to reading and responding to the writing of workshop participants. 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 to utilize that for future 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 provide feedback on work you bring from home.

If writers can compose a novel in a month (as they do in National Novel Writing Month), then surely you can compose an essay in a week! Over the course of five days, we will begin, revise and edit a 750-word personal essay.  Writers of all levels are welcome to explore what can be done in this disciplined framework—beginning with a raw idea that turns into sentences and paragraphs and a rough draft ready for a reader. We will talk about how writers make those crucial decisions about what to keep, what to toss, and what to expand or condense.  Each day we will spend in reviewing one another’s drafts, along with specific exercises in revision. By Thursday we will be looking at sentence-level editing, with our last day spent on suggestions for when, where and why you might submit the piece.  In the process of taking an idea from random thought to polished draft, the workshop will provide a user-friendly template of the revision process, along with a clearer understanding of when and how readers can help, and when this short form is best for particular material. 

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments and provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

How do you create a strong and exciting plot in your novel? How do you connect the plot with various subplots? How do you set up 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 appreciate the use of subplots and the purpose of plot points. Plot, subplots and plot points create the main sequence of events and move your story from beginning to end. New and revised writing will be the focus in workshops.

You will complete the week with your plot outline in place, including two primary subplots, and a good sense of where plot points should be inserted.

This workshop is designed for new writers who are starting with a simple story idea, or those who have lost control of their story and need to figure out how to restructure it for the greatest impact.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week; critique writing you bring from home. 

Why do some stories make us lean forward? How do some books keep us turning the pages long past when our better judgment has told us to go to bed? The answer is suspense. And it belongs in every kind of story.

Suspense is more than just whodunnit (or whydunnit). Suspense is the necessary ingredient to get a reader invested in your story. Tension is created when we are emotionally invested in the characters but don't know what will happen to them. The stakes are high, the questions are unanswered, and the release awaits us if only we keep reading.

What is the central question of your story? This is a promise you make to the reader, a promise you must fulfill to make reading your work a gratifying experience. In this week-long workshop, we will identify this central question and expand outwards to see how it connects to every scene, character, and setting. Each day will include in-class writing and longer exercises to develop between sessions. We will study examples from other writers, and each participant will be able to workshop some of their writing. By the end of the week, your writing should be well on its way to being "un-put-downable."

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments, and provide feedback on the writing you produce in our week.

In his poem “A Course in Creative Writing” William Stafford writes 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 also 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 generate new writing through exercises and assignments, provide feedback on writing you produce in our week, and critique writing you bring from home.

In 1977, French novelist Serge Doubrovsky came up with the term “autofiction” to describe his novel, Fils.  Exactly what autofiction is has been hotly debated, first in France and later in the U.S. and U.K. ever since.  Autofiction is not simply another name for autobiographical fiction.  Depending on who’s using the term and in what context, autofiction might come close to what some writers term memoir, or it might come closer to the ironic metafictional treatments of Self popularized by such writers in the 1960’s and 70’s as Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth and more recently, Ben Lerner and Michael Chabon.  In this short course, we will sample it all, reading and writing “Fiction of strictly real events or facts” as well as fantastical and allegorical representations of ourselves, using much of our real biographical information, but not much else.  If you like the idea of exploring writing that takes you to an exciting but sometimes uncomfortable spot between real and imagined versions of yourself, then this is the course for you.

In advance of the workshop, I will make available to you several examples of different types of autofiction, but there will be no writing in advance of the workshop.  You can expect to write in class exercises as well as approximately 500 words a day outside of the workshop. 

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments.

You've been working on this thing for... how long? Months? Years? It's supposed to look like a novel, but now that you have 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. Maybe you're not writing one. You might be writing a cycle-of-stories-as-novel, or a faux memoir, or a "modular" novel with some unifying structural element. You might be writing a "fusion" novel, or even a "mash-up." 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 not bring novels to class; rather, they will bring an opening chapter, or a middle chapter, or even notes and notions. 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 generative poetry-writing workshop, students will learn the fundamentals of the fundamental element of poetry, the line. In what ways does the line stabilize, organize, and make meaning in the poem; in what ways does the line subvert, surprise, and re-make meaning? Can you write a sonnet without lines? How do you write a poem that goes really really fast? How do you slow a line down to a snail’s pace? Is this poem a foreign place, or is it a home // away from home? In 5 days with 5 respective units we will cover:

Unit 1: Starting line (the end of the sentence)

Unit 2: Lineage of the line (whose line is it anyway?)

Unit 3: Alignments (meaningful line arrangements)

Unit 4: Timelines (the line break’s time and space discontinuum)

Unit 5: Lines of flight (is it possible to write outside the lines?)

In each class we will discuss and close-read daily readings for form and technique, we will write in-class generative poetry exercises, and we will share each other’s work. Students will also bring in past work and re-line it in order to re-envision it. Students ultimately will learn not only to reframe their previous works, but to view the creation of poems from a higher, artful, and even more playful level. That said, all levels are welcome.