The blank page can feel like a glass wall we’re required to scale. We might wonder where to begin and how. While we are adept at narrativizing our own lives—even the dullest, most dreadful experiences become fodder for a good barstool story—when confronted with a blank page, our skill, our personality, and our pleasure too often abandon us. In this talk, Jessica Alexander considers how the anecdotes and casual stories we tell daily can help us discover our singular style as writers and guide us toward penning our most electric narratives. 

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Let’s face it—we all have it. Maybe we even need it to write well. But perfectionism can turn writing into a painful struggle. It can make it hard to get something down on the page and turn editing into a confusing hack-fest. We probably can’t control how we think, but we can adopt practices that help us outrun our perfectionism and edit effectively by getting quiet and listening to our intuition. Writing coach Mary Allen offers concrete advice and tips about how to outrun perfectionism and edit peacefully, calmly, and successfully.

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To borrow a cliché, let's go down the rabbit hole. But on the way down, let's observe the dirt, the worms, the twists, the darkness, the sacred and the profane. For a writing project, whether a short story or a novel, trope can be an entry point. Think: a locked room mystery, dark academia, a midlife crisis. Similarly, on the sentence level, cliché can be relatable and point the writer in the direction of deeper truth. Finally, identifying generic language and abstraction can guide revision. This session will draw from popular novels and explore how literary writers use character and voice to successfully subvert trope and cliché to create meaning. 

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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!

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Narrative nonfiction writing often relies on the memory of the author and/or those we consult. But how reliable is memory? How do our memories differ from others, and what do we do as nonfiction writers when there are differing memories that emerge in our research about an event in the past? How does our account of memories on the page alter or replace the memories that existed before they were recorded? In this lecture and discussion, we will examine the role of memory in nonfiction writing. 

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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.

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In 2020, Eric Goodman published Cuppy and Stew, a historical novel/faux memoir. In 2025, his second historical project, Mary Dowling, Mother of Bourbon, a blend of historical fiction and narrative nonfiction, will be published. In this nuts-and-bolts craft lecture, Goodman will discuss his experience with both primary and secondary sources and reveal professional tips for writing about the past. Technological improvements have made historical research easier, but creating three-dimensional characters, once you know what they did, remains the greatest challenge and pleasure of this exciting genre. 

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This lecture will mine the logic behind the common assumption that a poem cannot be translated, and will argue instead for what is gained in translation (answer: all of literature as we know it). Through considering the work of Sir Robert Wyatt, Federico Garcia Lorca, Lady Gaga, Sofia Coppola's horrendous film Lost in Translation, and others, we'll move from the question "Can a poem be translated" to the question "Can a poem avoid translation?" to the question "Can a poem even be written in the first place (without translation)?" 

There’s an important difference between our entire life experience and the narrower story that we create from it—the lump of clay versus the sculpture. In this lecture, Sarah Saffian—a memoirist, writing teacher, and psychotherapist—explores the concept of journal writing and its usefulness both personally, as a means of achieving deeper, clearer reflection and processing, for ourselves; and creatively, as the raw material that we draw from to craft the stories that we tell to enlighten and entertain others. Please bring materials to participate in writing prompts during this lecture. 

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“Lower limit speech / Upper limit music,” wrote poet Louis Zukofsky. This lecture explores poetry and other writing that reaches toward that upper limit. How can we make engaging music with nothing but words on a page? What happens when fiction and nonfiction “break into song” at key moments? We’ll consider the possibilities for song and rhythm in poetry and other genres, with prompts for your writing and toe-tapping inspired by Theodore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brooks, and more.

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Why is it that some narrators feel real to us—as if they were sitting across the table, telling us their story? And why do we feel so utterly compelled to listen to them? The sense of a narrator’s deeply individual presence starts with what we like to call voice, the linguistic expression of character. Voice is why your mother can call you up on the phone and start talking without ever stopping to identify herself. You know it’s her because of her voice. Voice is the feeling of the person behind the words. But how does voice work? And how do we create it in our writing? We’ll analyze some examples from great works of fiction and nonfiction, and then put what we’ve learned to work in our own writing through in-class exercises. 

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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.

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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.

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