The Eleventh Hour Lecture Series is comprised of hour-long presentations at 11:00 a.m. each weekday of the Festival. The series features issues of special interest to writers, including aspects of craft, process, the writing life, and publishing. Fridays in the Eleventh Hour are reserved for a faculty reading.

The Eleventh Hour Series is free and open to the public. In 2023, the series is held in Phillips Hall, Room 100. 

 

To listen to past lectures, visit the Eleventh Hour Podcast on the Writing University webpage.

 

Recent Lectures in the Eleventh Hour Series: 

 

In Praise of Terrible Ideas: Revision Strategies for Prose. Rachel Yoder, Presenter

Author Kelly Link says in a Fail Safe podcast interview, “The really terrible ideas are much, much closer to interesting ideas than ideas which are good enough.” With this in mind, we'll take a look at the revision process and how to deploy what may seem like terrible ideas to your advantage, among other revision strategies. In addition to looking at the creative processes of a number of authors—examining their first and final drafts, the changes they made, and their thinking behind the process—we'll go over the basics of line editing. At the end of the lecture, you'll have some revision techniques to try out with your own writing as well as a better understanding of what works for your own creative process. To fully take advantage of this lecture, participants should have a completed short story draft in hand to use during exercises.

 

Prepping for Publication: How and Where to Submit Your Manuscripts. Kelly Dwyer, Presenter

You’ve written and revised a novel, memoir, story, flash fiction, or poem, and now you want to submit it for publication. As she navigates the publication of her third novel, Ghost Mother (Union Square & Co., 2024), author Kelly Dwyer will take us through the process. We’ll discuss where you might consider sending your shorter works and how to send a novel or memoir to an agent. Kelly will provide tips on how to write an appealing query letter and synopsis, as well as touch on contemporary issues around self-publishing and AI. This presentation is for writers at all stages, from beginning writers who have never submitted their work, to published authors who are looking to finetune their submission process. By the end of the hour, we’ll all be this much closer to seeing our writings in print!

WATCH THE VIDEO

 

Good Sound: Poetry for Prose Writers. Diana Goetsch, Presenter

We should require of prose what we expect of poetry: vividness, compression, and good sound. The last of these is often neglected by prose writers, as though they were working in a silent genre, or sound was merely a decorative concern. Wrong. What Duke Ellington said of music—“If it sounds good it is good”—holds true for writing. So does the converse: if it isn’t music, it can’t be wisdom. This Eleventh Hour talk will present how central good sound is to fiction and nonfiction writing—providing examples and techniques for improving sound in prose.

 

Crafting “Excess.” Darius Stewart, Presenter

For this talk, we—together, you and I, audience and speaker—will explore maximalist writing as an aesthetics of excess that, according to Will Hertel, strives to “submerge readers with informational deluges, utilizing a variety of subject material and literary techniques and genres to maintain attention.” However, chief among our discussion will be the question: what if one is a writer who only wants to use this technique occasionally, and elsewhere engage in a less elaborative style? Can this be achieved by crafting excess—that is, attending deliberately to pacing, use of figurative language, and/or a robust narrative voice? I believe so. Writers of any genre and experience can benefit from our discussions, which will include examinations of prose works from Richard Wright, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

 

Exploring the Power of Image Through Haiku. Robert Anthony Siegel, Presenter

One of the key elements in successful writing is imagery—the word-pictures that directly transmit what the writer sees. But while fiction and nonfiction students typically get a lot of help with things like plot and structure, imagery often goes unmentioned, in part because it is so very hard to talk about how to make better images. Therein lies the value of haiku for prose writers. The super-short, imagistic form of poetry imported from Japan offers a strikingly clear (and very fun) way to practice making images. Over the course of the hour, we will read and write haiku together, using the experience to deepen our understanding of the role of imagery in our own writing, and to enrich our visual imaginations.

 

What’s Hidden Beneath: A Writer’s Exploration of Form, Genre and Grief. Juliet Patterson, Presenter

Part-lecture, part-artist-talk, this session will unveil one writer’s process in, through, and about grief. Poet Juliet Patterson, author of Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022), will discuss the challenges and pitfalls of writing memoir connected to ancestral trauma, considering methods of research, creating scenes, and crafting a narrative. How do we integrate research and history into our work? How can we use form as a method of inspiration? How can we embody our memories more authentically? And how do we manage our emotional body in the process of writing? These are some of the questions we’ll address in this talk through a variety of short exercises and discussion.

 

A Woman of Genius: Remembering Lynda Hull. Susan Aizenberg, Presenter

In the years between 1980 and her death at age thirty-nine in an automobile accident in 1994, the late Lynda Hull composed a body of work that marks her as one of the great lyric poets of our generation, including two prize-winning collections, Ghost Money (1986) and Star Ledger (1991), and a posthumous third collection, The Only World (1995). In 2006, all three collections were brought together in a single volume, Lynda Hull: Collected, in Graywolf’s RE/VIEW series edited by Mark Doty. During her life, Hull was teacher and mentor to many poets, one whose devotion to her students and to the art of poetry demonstrates, as Mark Doty has written of her, “how transformative the exchanges between teacher and student might be.” In this Eleventh Hour, we’ll remember Lynda Hull and celebrate her enduring legacy as both a brilliant poet and a generous and remarkable teacher.

 

Under Review: A Panel on Pitching, Submitting, Community, and the Future of Literary Journals. Lynne Nugent, Nina Lohman, and Hannah Bonner, Presenters

With the shuttering of publications like Tin House, Astra, Catapult, Bookforum, and The Believer (albeit briefly), it’s a strange time to cut your teeth as a writer. Midsized journals are abandoning experimentation and innovation in order to secure funding. Meanwhile, massive journals like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic have shifted toward fleeting think-pieces, celebrity clickbait, and hate-reads to attract corporate advertisers. It feels like the floor could drop out at any moment, and yet, whenever we look around a room full of writers, we know there’s still so much brilliant art being created. So where’s this art to go? Good news is: for every sad headline, there are two or three working editors who’ve carved out new venues and are opening doors—these opportunities just might be a bit trickier to find. Join editors Lynne Nugent, Nina Lohman, and Hannah Bonner as they provide an insider look into the present, past, and future of literary journals. Yes, we’ll cover tips and tricks for pitching your work (as well locating the right places to pitch), but we’ll also explore how to cultivate a community of readers and collaborators in an ever-changing landscape. Hope can be a dangerous word, but where’s the fun in art without a little risk?

 

Upcoming Eleventh Hour Lectures

Writing Homeward: Locating your Fiction and Nonfiction

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Clarisse Baleja Saïdi
Scheduled
No
Much of fiction and nonfiction concerns itself with inner and outer belonging. In an age of fast and slow travel, authenticity within diversity, the exercise of coming home—to a place, to the self—emerges as a mission statement of our creative work. In this workshop, we tackle that mission together. From the haunted house story to memoirs of a life spent in exile, whether writing a domestic drama, opinion pieces, or travelogues, we will bring narrative strategy and focus to writing that faces, inhabits, or complicates the idea of home, locale, and (impossible?) returns. This course is designed for writers of all levels, whether you have work in mind or in progress or prefer to generate new ideas and writing in class. We’ll read and discuss successful essays and stories that bravely approach site and situation, including works by Isaac Babel, Noviolet Bulawayo, and Harry Crews. Expect an exploration of setting, exteriority, momentum, pacing, and arc, and the chance to brainstorm, examine, and improve prose written from your very own social location. This course will include a 20-minute conference with each participant. Our sessions will be comprised of reading discussions, lectures, an in-class writing practice, as well as sharing opportunities. All readings will be provided. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; workshop writing you bring from home.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?: Writing About Love

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Katie Jean Shinkle
Scheduled
No
Calling all lovers! Do you wish to explore the yearning, burning, desire of romance? The grief of heartbreak? The loneliness of unrequited love? The complex betrayal of lost familial and/or platonic love? In this workshop we will seek to understand the challenges and joys of writing about love. The course is open to writers of any genre (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction/essay, hybrid forms) who want to generate new material or add to preexisting material or works in progress. Throughout the week, each class will focus on a specific category of love: romance, heartbreak, unrequited love, and familial/platonic love. We will engage in short reading assignments of poetry, fiction, essay, and hybrid forms to study how writers capture love, with special attention given to craft elements such as language, the line and sentence, mood and atmosphere, tension, scene, character, and more. We will use the texts as inspiration for our own work, and we will generate new writing (in the genre of your choice) through exercises, experiments, rituals, and prompts. We will also offer first impressions and in-class feedback on the writing you produce in our week together. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Revising Poems for Publication

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Justin Wymer
Scheduled
No
Every poem is a living thing, an experiment in feeling and image, an exploration of psyche, an artist’s creation—a perfect example of crystalized subjective experience. Because the eye of the critic (and journal editor) is notoriously subjective, it is impossible to predict what they will love or hate. But it is possible to polish your poems as best you can and to avoid common craft choices that many editors have historically found distasteful. In other words, to publish work in literary journals, it is important to revise your poems meticulously so that it is their content and not their craft that an editor passes judgment upon. In this workshop, we will discuss concrete revision strategies, with an eye toward identifying your personal poetic values and developing a revision methodology based on them. Craft topics that will be discussed include beginnings and endings, diction, register, line breaks, titles, image and image progression, and form and content. We will revise poems you bring from home and discuss avenues for future revision and expansion. By the end of the course, writers will have developed a toolbox of revision techniques that they can apply to their poems to make them as “clean” as possible for editors’ eyes. 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.

Travel Writing Made Easy, and It's All Travel Writing

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Mary Allen
Scheduled
No
Our travels through life are unavoidably interesting. Whatever happens to us—a hike through the desert, a night stuck in the airport, a trip to Hawaii, a stay in the hospital—anywhere we go and anything we do there—becomes a captivating adventure if we pay close attention and turn it into a story. And turning whatever happens in our travels into something we can write about makes us pay attention to whatever’s there, while something is happening or after the fact, and that makes everything more interesting and enjoyable; even the hard stuff becomes easier. In this class, we’ll use easy, fun, foolproof writing exercises to turn our travel stories into writing that’s fresh, exciting, and surprising. We’ll create a small creative community in a strictly positive environment. And we’ll talk about how to use writing as a life tool that can turn every trip we go on, whether it’s exciting and wonderful or not so wonderful, into a transformative experience, for us and our readers, allowing us to make the most of our travels through life. This class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend. Feedback for in-class writing is strictly positive.

Building a Real World in Fiction

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Kelly Dwyer
Scheduled
No
Close your eyes and imagine the drawing room scene in which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. Now imagine the Tea Party scene with the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. What about the scene in The Shining in which Wendy sees what her husband Jack has been typing all this time? Now think of a vivid scene from a novel or memoir from your reading. Can you picture everything clearly, as if you’re watching a movie? World building is not just for fantasy writers. All fiction writers and memoirists must build our worlds, whether the world is Edwardian England, an imaginary land through a rabbit hole, a haunted hotel in Colorado, the world of your 1970s childhood, or the world we’re all currently living in. When we do this, scenes come to life and readers truly enter the world of our stories—and don’t want to return to the “real world” again. In this weekend workshop, we will: Introduce the concept of world building. Study a few examples of well-built fictional and autobiographical worlds. Learn how to create a history and timeline (backstory) for our characters. Visualize our worlds, using various techniques. Learn techniques that will help us create vivid scenes—and then put them into practice through exercises. Discover the just-right balance between exposition and dialogue in scenes so that they come to life. Be a member of a supportive and stimulating community of writers. Write! The class will consist of a combination of lecture, discussion, writing, and sharing. We will do various exercises throughout the weekend to work on world building, and you’ll have the opportunity to receive verbal feedback on your work. Writers may bring work from home to work on or generate new material—or both. This class is appropriate for writers of all levels. We can’t wait to enter into your fictional or autobiographical worlds! 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.

Block Party: Break Through Writers’ Block and Get Yourself Writing Again

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Mieke Eerkens
Scheduled
No
Cursing the blinking cursor? Maybe you’ve reached an impasse in your project. Maybe you’ve wanted to start a project for a while but you can’t seem to find the way in. There are only a few lucky writers who never seem to have this problem, and for whom the words flow forth unimpeded. For the rest of us, some literary Drano™ comes in handy from time to time. This course for writers at all levels aims to help you figure out where you’re stuck, why you’re stuck, and how to get moving so you leave the class inspired and reengaged with your projects. We’ll look at helpful tools for overcoming your blocks, use in-class writing exercises to address your issues, and get words on paper to motivate you to move forward beyond the class. Together, we will slay writer’s block in a fun, inspiring atmosphere. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; workshop writing you bring from home.

Getting It Right in Longform Fiction & Nonfiction: An Advanced Workshop

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Eric Goodman
Scheduled
No
This advanced prose workshop is intended for students who’ve completed a draft, or a substantial portion of a draft, of a novel or a longform work of nonfiction, be it memoir or narrative. It’s designed to answer the question: I’ve come this far, now what? To begin, we will consider up to 7 double-spaced pages of material that students bring from home. These pages could be the opening scenes of your book, but that’s not a requirement. Students will also generate a new “missing” scene, so be prepared to write. During our weekend together, class members will be guided through the process of transforming an early draft into a polished one, or a polished draft into a final one. I’ve completed this process quite a few times and guided many students through it as well. What will make the manuscript better? Does the book start where it should? How do you know when you’re done? In whose voice, or voices, should the narrative be told? What crucial scene have you omitted because it’s difficult, or even terrifying, to write? We’ll attempt to answer these questions and more. You’ll come away with one new scene. We’ll also touch on what to do with your manuscript once you’ve finished. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; workshop writing you bring from home.

Ficetry Potions!: Finding Poetry in Fiction, Fiction in Poetry, and a Magical Friendship Between Forms

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Caryl Pagel,
Madeline McDonnell
Scheduled
No
In this team-taught, generative workshop, poet Caryl Pagel and fiction writer Madeline McDonnell will wage a battle for generic dominance, trying to win students over either to the side of poetry or fiction once and for all, because writing is a zero-sum game. Just kidding! In fact, Caryl and Madeline will help poets find their inner liars, and fiction writers their inner lyres. We will spend the weekend collaboratively reading poems and short works of fiction, exploring their correspondences and conversations in form and content, and then completing exercises engaging the strategies discussed. All the while, we will consider: How might we find plots in prosody and lyrics inside story arcs? What’s the difference between poetry and fiction, anyway? Does it matter? Students should expect to emerge with the starts of several new pieces—but will they be poems, stories? Stoems? Pories? We don’t know, but they will definitely be magic! In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

A Cavalcade of Memoir Writing Exercises

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June Melby
Scheduled
No
Are you writing a memoir? Need a little extra push down the road? This weekend course will get your motor running, revving, and racing in a cavalcade of memoir exercises! I’ve been writing and teaching memoir for almost twenty years, and I’ve gathered the most inspiring and time-tested prompts for two jam-packed days of creativity. Topics will include: crafting characters from real people, creating scenes that are riveting, developing yourself as a character, and digging deeper to find the emotional core. We’ll explore adding sensory details and setting to elevate your story, and (of course) writing scenes with humor. Some exercises will be short, some will be long. We’ll experiment with a wide range of techniques to tell your story, and ideas on how to enrich it. You will have the opportunity to read aloud some of your new writing with the class. Bring a notebook or laptop—or both! Together, we will write a ton. At the end of the weekend, you will have a lot of new pages to add to your memoir, new pieces to expand upon after class is over, and new insight on how to make your memoir zing. We’ll have an inspiring, sometimes hilarious, butt-kicking weekend together. This course is designed to move you far ahead down your memoir path, whether you are just getting started or well on your way. We will cheer each other on, and leave with full notebooks, full hearts, and a bunch of new writing friends. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

How to Pitch a Movie or TV Show

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Kat O'Brien
Scheduled
No
Got a great idea for a movie or TV show? Anyone ever tell you that your book should be on the big screen? Maybe your latest great idea features characters in a world that feels like it belongs to a TV series? Join award-winning screenwriter, producer, and story consultant Kat O’Brien in this weekend workshop to demystify the process of adapting, pitching, and producing your writing for film and television. This workshop will be an opportunity for writers of all genres and levels of experience to refine pitch materials for an existing project, and/or generate new pitches through guided exercises and prompts. We’ll identify the qualities that make story ideas viable for film and television and explore how to position your work strategically for the most suitable platform. Each day will combine lecture, discussion, time to write, and workshops delivering writer-centered feedback and first impressions on writing produced during the weekend. Our first day will provide you with an opportunity to answer your burning questions and take home a toolkit to refine your (new or existing) pitch overnight to present and workshop the next day. Writers will leave class with a creative, strategic, and tactical understanding of how to pitch movies and television like a Hollywood insider. Our workshop will leverage pitching as a tool for more robust story development, and help writers understand how various pitch techniques can attract producers, financing, and/or collaborators to help them make their silver screen dreams a reality. Whether you’re new to screenwriting and producing or looking to refine your pitching technique for all formats and platforms, this weekend intensive will offer a dynamic, supportive, structured environment to help you realize your ideas from pitch to screen. Takeaways: Brainstorm multiple new ideas for viable films and/or TV shows. Refine ideas into professional pitch materials such as loglines, synopses, and one-pagers. Navigate next steps to develop your feature or TV idea as a screenplay. 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.