Memoirists face two essential tasks: First, to tell the story of plotted story of action, the narrative of what happened. Second, to tell the story of one’s own change and growth over time, and the story of what it all means. That second story is where the author’s larger message is conveyed, elevating one person’s experience from the unique and personal to the universal and shared. It reveals what your story is 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 identified what that larger message is?

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Maybe you have an exciting idea for a memoir or narrative nonfiction book you’d like to write. “That’s a great idea!” people say. “Just write it!” they say. So you sit down and write. And you write. And you write some more. But the story meanders aimlessly, spins off in multiple directions, or seems to fizzle after 30 or 40 pages. You aren’t sure where it’s going, how to tell your story, or how to actually turn this unwieldy thing into a book. Do not despair. You are not alone. This workshop is for you! In this workshop, we will talk about common pitfalls in writing a book-length project. We’ll discuss things like the importance of structure and a clear understanding of the underlying themes that drive your book in order to carry your reader from chapter to chapter. We’ll share our individual projects and writing to receive peer and instructor feedback, and to evaluate potential overarching issues. You’ll leave the course with tangible resources to support you, and a better idea of how to approach and develop your longer writing project, so that when you return home you will feel more confident about where exactly you’re going when you sit down to write your book.

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

Plot and character drive the action in most fiction, but time-management and “camerawork” are crucial for enriching the story and drawing a reader in. This weeklong session is open to all levels, but will be particularly useful for writers who feel comfortable with the basics and are looking for techniques to make their storytelling more dynamic—“dynamic” because time-management and camerawork thrive on variation, as much as on consistency. At any point in a story, the normal forward tempo of time—maybe for a sentence, or maybe for a passage—stops (for a description of the mud room beside the kitchen) or rewinds itself in a blur (for a flashback of how the windowpane got cracked) or speeds up (for a sweeping summary of how that crack spread in subtle ways throughout the house). Likewise, a single short paragraph that begins with a bird’s-eye view of a city might zoom in and finish inside one character’s inner monologue. We’ll look at dozens of examples of both techniques and do guided writing exercises so that you can feel from the inside the textures these techniques create. Most importantly, we’ll examine how the two techniques influence each other—how time-management affects the camerawork, and vice versa. You’ll go home with the tools to make your narrator nimbler and your storytelling more gripping.

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

"If we spend our lives remembering what we love/ to be sure who we are..." begins a Richard Hugo poem. The poet goes on, partly recalling and partly creating a remembrance of place and time. Of course, we don’t only remember “what we love,” but also what we lose, lack, long for, laugh at, or even loathe. The combination of recovery and creativity, the shaping, re-shaping, recalling and imaginative revising that constitutes memory, is, perhaps not coincidentally, very much the process of poetry.

How much of the poetry of memory rests on fact, and how much upon imagination? Are poems merely vehicles for expressing what we remember, and hope to preserve, or is memory also inherent in the language itself, if we trust it well, or draw from it deeply? Can poems (sound, metaphor, coherence, surprise, humor) possibly remember more than the poets who wrote them? We live in a time of fragmentation and forgetting, in the shadow of a pandemic and various cultural reckonings that need the very kind of remembering poetry provides, for both private and public reasons. Certainly, poems often call upon memory, but can we learn, as writers, to allow poems to help us remember? Is it even possible to think of memory, for better or worse, as our lifelong poem in progress?

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This workshop is for any writer in any stage of a memoir—planning, just starting, in process, or stuck. It is also ideal for anyone interested in learning the fundamentals of narrative nonfiction. We will explore key ingredients of memoir writing, applicable across all styles and subjects. Topics include structure, framing, shaping, time, tense, points of entry, compression, unity, dialogue, “the messy middle,” and the place of “creativity” in narrative nonfiction. This will not be a revision or manuscript workshop; instead, the emphasis will be on stretching your craft, and thinking through your project. Each meeting will include models, talks, Q&A, and practice pertaining to a key skill or approach to memoir writing. There will also be opportunities to read what you write—though no one will be forced to read.

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

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, Patricia Lockwood et al.) and consider characterization techniques and the question of empathy. Does your main character have to be “likeable”? What is “likeable” anyway?

We’ll also ask questions about dialogue, idiolect and profanity (yes, swearing is an artful activity!). We’ll 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?

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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 week together, but we will read a number of poets from different "schools" and carefully listen to different modes of expression that might 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. When you come to Iowa City, bring three of your own lyric poems that you'd like to re-envision in multiple ways.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide feedback on writing brought from home as we revise poems in class.

This is a class for those who have done substantive work on a novel and are seeking peer and instructor feedback preparatory to completing a first draft or revision. You will describe and evaluate your novel using instructor templates. Write and share new passages, especially of character interiority. Participants are expected to do substantial work between classes, and are encouraged to work in pairs or small groups. The instructor will read/review written summaries and short passages. A writer beginning a novel from scratch might not be able to keep up, but it is not necessary to have a lot of pages written if you have a strong premise and a basic plot. You will receive intensive feedback on ideas, but we will not workshop manuscripts. Based on the concepts in Scofield, The Last Draft: A Novelist's Guide to Revision.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; critique writing you bring from home.

You have all the ingredients for a great novel: a wonderful story to tell, fascinating characters to follow, and a compelling world to explore. Perhaps you’ve already written some pages and watched the sparks fly as your characters come together in all the complicated ways that real people do. The question now is how to make your novel work over hundreds of pages—and keep the reader turning those pages.

The answer is structure.

Structure includes plot but reaches beyond plot to include basic decisions about which parts of your story to tell in scene and which parts to summarize in exposition—and in what order those elements should come. Structure creates a clearly marked road map for the writer to follow.

This weeklong course is designed to help you figure out how to create a structure for your novel. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class creative exercises you will be invited to share with the group, we will:
· Explore the desires that drive your most important characters to act
· Understand how the conflict that starts with your protagonist creates your plot
· Experience how scene works as a dramatic unit, and how it combines with exposition to cover large spans of time
· Make decisions about which parts of your story to tell in scene
· Explore the idea of character arc, in which characters struggle and change in response to events

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Have you ever wondered if the stories you’ve grown up hearing about your family would make for a powerful written work? Have you ever considered bringing the story of your own life to the page? If so, this weeklong workshop is right for you. Writers will learn the difference between an engaging anecdote and a compelling work of art by experimenting in a variety of forms: short stories, literary essays, poetry, hybrid, and experimental work. Close readings of published work and generative writing exercises will draw forth the matters of craft at hand, and workshop sessions will help participants shape the raw materials of life into persuasive works of prose or poetry. Beginners are welcome; the focus will be on generating new work, but participants are welcome to bring project ideas to the table.

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