How can playwriting give us new insight into fiction, poetry, and more? This workshop explores experiments in playwriting—for writers from across genres. It’s designed for anyone who’s curious about how techniques from theater can inform their work in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scripted forms, a personal writing practice, and more. Come refresh your dialogue, come explore how theatrical formats can inspire your poems and essays, come revise a piece by considering ideas from theater and performance studies. We'll take inspiration from works that distinctly approach dialogue, character, staging, performance, pacing, format, and other elements. And we’ll ask how those techniques can help us generate and revise our work. This workshop supports the generation of new writing and/or the revision of older work, all in a supportive and close-knit environment. Activities will include in-class writing and discussion, review of one another’s work, and analysis of published sources. No previous experience with playwriting or theater is required, and the course warmly welcomes writers who have no interest in being performers themselves. For two days, we’ll ask what playwriting can inspire for our writing, helping everyone gain insights that can energize their work and help it come to life on and off the page. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home.

What is theme? How do I structure a novel? How can I discover and write exciting characters? What’s the difference between writing scene versus exposition, and how do I do it? If you have asked any of these questions of yourself while staring at the blank page, this is the right course for you. Geared toward beginning and intermediate fiction writers, this class will provide fun, engaging writing exercises, fascinating instructional handouts, lively discussion, and a safe and supportive critique workshop. Step-by-step instructions on basic skills will help you uncover with simplicity and precision the fundamental craft of writing fiction. New work will be generated during class time, but students are also free to revise and work on their previously written fiction. Everyone will have a chance to workshop their writing, (bring yours from home or start fresh in this workshop) and ask questions about how to move forward. All fiction genres welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. In this all-genre workshop, we will take inspiration from Dickinson’s poem and tell it queer, approaching language and its joyful possibilities from an angle of queerness. During our weekend, we will read and discuss work by writers who illuminate queer points of view and we will generate new queer writing of our own. Through in-class prompts that build on one another, we will explore queerness not only as subject but as an artistic practice, the very lens through which we envision and release our writing. As we pick up our writing tools—the sounds and shapes of our words, the music of our sentences—we can ask: What makes a setting queer? How about dialogue? What choices does queerness offer our protagonists and poems? Where does our imagination go when we allow queerness to bloom at the very heart of our creativity? By writing, reading, and sharing together, we will foster a safe, resonant space to bend our language into an instrument of pleasure, witness, and truth—“The Truth’s superb surprise,” as Dickinson says. This workshop is open to all writers. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

When we write letters, we are opening up a conversation with an imagined listener. They could be a trusted confidant(e), a lover, a family member—or even a politician, representative, or figure of authority. We combine anecdote with fact-telling. We can share secrets, imagine futures, or request information and action, depending on our intended audience. Even the diary is a sustained letter to the self, an audience of one. In this course, writers will learn how the epistle (i.e., letter) is a mode of writing that can apply to poetry. We will approach the epistolary poem as a hybrid text written either to an indistinct or very specific person or thing. By exploring perspective and audience in the epistolary poem, we will generate poems in unbounded ways, invite in the strange and excessive to our work, balance “facts” and feelings, and even begin producing a poem series that can be used to pattern full-length works and chapbooks. Because the epistle is a highly adaptable mode of writing, writers of all genres and skill levels are welcome. In this workshop, we will revise poems you bring from home and discuss avenues for future revision and expansion. Please bring at least one poem written to another person, as the workshop will incorporate strategies for both revision and generating new writing. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home.

This weeklong workshop is intended for anyone whose writing project involves bringing the past to life, whether it’s your own life, the life of family members, or the life and times of fully fictional characters. Some topics we’ll consider: What’s the best way to conduct your research, then incorporate that research into your narrative? How do you animate the past? If you’re writing memoir and the significant events have already happened, how do you make them feel fresh for the reader? What are some writerly tricks when writing historical prose, and what are some common pitfalls to avoid? Workshop members are expected to arrive with a 5- to 10-page sample of their writing project, which the group will consider. We’ll also generate new work using directed writing prompts. Instructor Eric Goodman’s eight book, Mother of Bourbon, a historical novel, will be published in April 2025. His sixth book, Cuppy and Stew (2020), combined historical fiction and faux memoir, so he’s spent considerable time in the past five years wrestling the past onto the page. In this first-time workshop, he’ll pass on what’s he learned. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

Good storytelling requires a sure touch with narration, characterization, and dialogue. None of these ingredients can be neglected. But when do you use which? How do you find the right balance? This is a nuts-and-bolts craft workshop for fiction writers of all levels. Novelists, short story writers, and flash aficionados are all welcome. We’ll compare the merits of first-person and third-person narration, and the extra risks of using the second person. We’ll also dissect 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 reflect on 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? During the week, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on what you produce; AND, for participants who desire it, we will workshop writing you bring from home. (This last activity is not obligatory, but it is encouraged.) I’ll also supply reading materials from eminent writers to illustrate key issues. Whether you’re an experienced writer or a newbie, whether you’re in the process of revision or haven’t finished your first draft, you will leave this workshop with a keener appreciation of the tools at your disposal and how they might serve your writing. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book tells the seemingly simple story of two characters passing a single season on a small island, and yet writers ranging from Ali Smith to Phillip Pullman to Kathryn Davis have praised the novel’s “magnitude” and “genius,” and have suggested that it “comes to represent the whole universe.” In this generative prose workshop, we will use Johnson’s deceptively minimal masterpiece as a touchstone as we begin to assemble our own summer books from the unique driftwood floating in our memories and imaginations. How might a whole world—or at least a whole book—be constructed out of these discrete pieces? What locations, seasons, or characters from our own imagined or actual experiences might intersect—or bump surprisingly against one another—to yield a sustained and sustaining longer work? What narrative and expressive possibilities might be afforded by dispensing with causal plot structures, and by imagining a book not as a propulsive progression but as a more mysterious container for discontinuous but coalescing material? We will endeavor to answer such questions by collaboratively reading the crystalline, yet obscurely connected, components that comprise Johnson’s novel, alongside selections from other books built out of small prose blocks by writers like Sei Shōnagon, Giada Scodellaro, Maggie Nelson, and Sigrid Nunez. Just as crucially, we will explore the novelistic potential of the vignette by responding to writing prompts inspired by all we’ve discussed and discovered. By the end of the week, each student should expect to have started their own [Iowa] Summer [Writing Festival] Book! Lovers of literature (and summer!) at all levels of experience are welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

This class will focus on how we can use an investigation and exploration of the wider world as a springboard for writing more nuanced and resonant personal narratives. How can we situate our stories in larger social, political, and cultural spheres? How might we use research, journalism, or lyric association to show the connections held within our own stories? By the end of this course, participants will have greater fluency with blending various types of nonfiction and a more thorough understanding of the possibilities for opening up their personal narratives. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss a longer piece of their own work and read each other’s; while much of that discussion will focus on feedback for these pieces, we will also talk about how to grow and sustain communities of like-minded (and sometimes not like-minded!) readers. Participants will also have the option of completing short daily writing assignments that model the various strategies of approaching a narrative and are based upon the authors we read, such as Zadie Smith, Emily Maloney, Elena Passarello, and Lidia Yuknavitch. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

For anyone who dreams about writing the movie they want to see—here’s your opportunity. Join award-winning screenwriter, producer, and story consultant Kat O’Brien in this weeklong workshop to unlock the cinematic potential of your storytelling. Whether you’re a novelist, memoirist, journalist, poet, or playwright curious about translating your storytelling skills to film, this course will help you navigate the art and craft of screenwriting while staying true to your unique voice. For writers new to screenwriting and seasoned pros alike, this course will be tailored to guide you through your unique process of bridging that gap between the movie in your mind and the screenplay on the page. This workshop is an opportunity for writers of all genres and levels of experience to develop and kickstart a draft of a feature-length screenplay. Bring a work in progress to refine or start from scratch and generate something new. Each session will combine lecture, discussion, interactive activities, time to write, and workshops delivering writer-centered feedback and first impressions on writing produced in class. Day one, we’ll start by pitching our ideas for new or existing feature stories. During our subsequent daily sessions, we’ll develop feature-length outlines, learn the guidelines of industry-standard screenplay format, and draft and table-read at least 10 pages of a feature film screenplay that will set you up to write a full-length feature on your own schedule. Whether you’re new to screenwriting or looking to refine your screenwriting craft, this weeklong intensive will offer a dynamic, supportive, structured environment to help you realize your ideas from pitch to page to screen at a pace that works for you, mindful of your unique creative bandwidth. Takeaways: Create professional pitch materials such as loglines, synopses, and one-pagers. Develop a feature-length, detailed step-outline. Draft and receive feedback on at least 10 pages of a feature screenplay that will set you up to finish the script on your own schedule In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

Do your poems ignite in form or flurry? Are you a counter, a feeler, a connector, or a mess? A tinkerer or an iterator? Do your lines tend to blossom or knot? In this poetry workshop we’ll read and respond to participant poems with attention to control and chaos (not mutually exclusive) and how they manifest in one’s subjects, processes, revision practices, and endings. This class will be generative, joyful, energetic, and inquisitive. We’ll begin the week by sharing participant-made “calibration bouquets” (a small collection of what influences or provokes your writing) in order to quickly get to know each other’s work. Though our discussions will center participant writing, we’ll also take a look at poems by Lo Kwa Mei-en, Harryette Mullen, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Lauren Shapiro—all writers interested in the intersection of turmoil and structure. This workshop is open to poets at all levels with a desire to explore what makes a poem fit together or fall apart. Each participant will workshop at least three poems, and our week together will include a one-on-one conference and personalized reading list. In this workshop, we will offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.