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 to Make Sense of the World

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Hope Edelman
Scheduled
No
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion has famously said. Don’t we know it. We tell ourselves stories to find order in chaos, to make sense of what may otherwise feel too big or incomprehensible to bear. Have you been on a wild ride lately? Maybe you’ve faced an unexpected or unprecedented event. Or perhaps you’ve experienced a hardship that brought you right to the edge of what you imagined you could handle. Or maybe you’ve found yourself questioning who you are and what you stand for in a new and unfamiliar landscape. You don’t know what just happened. You don’t yet know what it means. You have questions. And not just a few. Good! That’s a perfect place to start. This course, for writers of all levels, is part writing workshop, part philosophical inquiry, and part creative playground. Daily prompts and exercises will help you externalize your thoughts and emotions and transform them into prose. We’ll place a strong emphasis on stories as vehicles for meaning making, and even dip into the psychology of what’s called “sense-making” to help you understand your own narrative impulses. Arrive with your half-formed thoughts, your confusions, your unresolved conflicts, and your existential questions. Expect to return home with at least one new piece of work in progress. As we generate new material, we’ll allow our minds to explore big ideas on the page, and we won’t force phony resolutions. Honesty and authenticity will be our guides. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Kickstarting Your Novel

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Robert Anthony Siegel
Scheduled
No
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 planning. Planning includes plot outlining, of course, but reaches beyond plot to include basic decisions about structure, meaning which parts of your story to tell in scene and which parts to summarize in exposition—and in what order those elements should come. Planning also includes thinking through the conflict driving your story, as well as the characters that populate it, and the somewhat slippery concepts of tone and voice essential to narration. Planning creates a clearly marked road map for the writer to follow. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class creative exercises that 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; and explore the idea of character arc, in which characters struggle and change in response to events. At the end of this course, you will have: a clear statement of what your protagonist wants, what stands in the way, and how this conflict is ultimately resolved at the end; a plot outline; a scene list; a character arc for your protagonist. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

To See and To Be Seen: The Profile/Memoir Hybrid

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Sarah Saffian
Scheduled
No
A profile is a portrait painted in words, with the writer bringing the subject to life on the page. A close friend or relative has an especially subjective lens, with a unique experience of the person in question. (For instance, a young man’s mother and fraternity brother would depict him differently, and rightly so.) Some profiles, while focused outward, are considered memoirs as well, with the narrator also coming across vividly through her particular relationship with and memories of the subject, her distinct view and voice. The main objective of this course is to write first-person profiles/memoirs that we’ll share and workshop together — mining our memories, researching and interviewing, and exploring the concept of multiple truths. We’ll also read and discuss excerpts from Lillian Ross’s Portrait of Hemingway; Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love, about her grandparents’ suicide pact; and Fourth and Mom, by Jean Masthay — a long-time and beloved ISWF student, who wrote a memoir about being the mother of a pro football player whose team won the Super Bowl. No writing to submit in advance, but please come with a certain person in mind as the subject of your memoiristic profile — Whose character is compelling to you? Whose story is, in a way, also your story? Who resonates with you, such that in revealing them you also reveal yourself? Inquisitive wordsmiths at all levels of writing experience are welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Form and Formlessness: A Poetry Workshop

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Juliet Patterson
Scheduled
No
Wallace Stevens once said, “The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used.” But what does that freedom look like for a poet? Does it mean following strict rules, or is there space for more intuitive exploration? In this workshop, we’ll dive into the exciting world of poetic forms, discovering how structure can spark creativity and open new possibilities. We’ll explore a mix of traditional forms like the sonnet and villanelle, as well as more contemporary and experimental forms, such as ghazals, golden shovels, cascades, and poetic collage. Through hands-on writing exercises and sharing drafts with the group, you’ll have the chance to experiment, play, and revise in a supportive and open environment. By the end of the week, you’ll leave with fresh material, new tools for embracing both the freedom and constraints of form, and a renewed sense of how breaking the rules can sometimes lead to the most surprising and exciting poetry. This workshop is open to novice and seasoned writers alike—no previous experience is required! In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Small Bodies, Big Minds: The Art of Writing Picture Books

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Tricia Elam Walker
Scheduled
No
Are you a kid at heart? Got a great idea for a picture book? This course is designed with you in mind! The children’s book publishing market is alive, thriving, and very competitive. So, how do you make sure your manuscript stands out? Let’s explore! By reading and discussing award-winning books and ones that simply touch hearts, we will investigate why and how writing for children is different from—but not easier than—writing for adults. Please bring one of your favorite children’s books to the first class (hard copies or pdfs acceptable). We will sort out the “rules” of picture-book writing as we discern what makes these books work. In addition, we will examine craft tips about writing for children from experts in the field. There will be in-class writing prompts and assignments to complete after class. We will “workshop” (students read and comment on each other’s work compassionately) the writing generated inside as well as outside of class. The focus will be on fiction, but we will also touch on tips for children’s nonfiction. This course is for new writers and/or writers who are new to picture-book writing, as well as those who have written a picture book manuscript but have not yet published one. (Participants may have previously published works for adults.) Through our readings, group discussions, and writing prompts, and by workshopping the writing you generate, you will come away brimming with ideas. You’ll leave the week with a draft manuscript and/or ideas for revising a manuscript you already have in the works. We will also touch on the world of traditional publishing and marketing. (Disclaimer: I have no experience with self-publishing.) 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. We will do it all!

Just Kill Me Now: Writing Humor

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Robin Hemley
Scheduled
No
Is being funny something that can be taught? Probably not. In fact, the idea of this course is foolhardy and might take several years off the instructor’s life. Here’s why: What people find funny is not universal. What’s considered funny changes across cultures, age groups, eras, and individuals. What’s tragic is much easier to agree upon, including the tragedy of people trying and failing to be funny. People who laugh at their own jokes won’t be barred from this course, but they will be administered horse sedatives. In truth, you don’t have to have any experience making others laugh, as long as you’re not humorless. It should be stressed that this is not a course for people who want to tell jokes. The instructor does not want to hear jokes and will regard jokesters with suspicion and fear. If you want to understand something about what makes a situation funny and why—in fiction, nonfiction, and yes, poetry, then this is the course for you. We will read and discuss humor across the ages, good and bad, in different forms and we will try our hands (limit: two) at being funny through daily exercises dealing with embarrassing memories, moments that went terribly wrong, and other means of making an audience laugh both at and with you. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Memoir: Pieces for the Whole

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James McKean
Scheduled
No
This workshop is based on the premise that the whole story is made up of parts, that writing a memoir starts with a compilation of many pieces—episodes or anecdotes or vignettes or moments held in memory. Designed for those who are in the process of sketching out these moments, this workshop will look at ways to “fashion a text” as Annie Dillard says, from “fragmentary patches of color and feeling,” especially for those trying to write about family with its many competing voices. We will look for narrative potential in the fragmentary material, the narrative potential in family artifacts, and vividness in language and detail. We will spend some time looking at short nonfiction examples to discover the possibility of form and narrative structures, but the majority of the workshop will be given to reading your work by an informed and sympathetic audience. In this workshop, we will critique writing you bring from home. Please bring two short pieces of your work in progress, a variety of questions, and a curiosity about how all this is done.