The Writing University Podcast

Beneath our writing is a deep sense of self that informs the way we organize experience and shape meaning. Autobiographical writing heightens our awareness of life's patterns and themes, concepts that in turn feed fiction, creative nonfiction, essay, and poetry. This discussion will draw on contemporary thinking in narrative psychology and narrative theory, as well as models from literature, in the framework of incorporating the story lens of life experience into our creative work.

Talent is important in creative writing, but resilience is critical. Writing is a lonely endeavor with much rejection. Even worse, our projects are often so long-term that they require the staying power of a marathon runner. So how do we develop that sort of endurance—that stubborn persistence? Tim Bascom will discuss tried-and-true habits from practicing writers who have refused to quit.

This lecture will consider the act of naming. How do we choose the names we give to the characters and figures in our stories and poems? How does a name give a character charge, or mark it, or erase it, or illuminate it? How can a name be used as a veil or a cape? An echo or a halo? What are the joys and pitfalls of using the names of the living and the dead inside acts of the imagination?

The best essays, according to John D’Agata, Director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, are a “mind on a page.” According to Bernard Cooper, they magnify “some small aspect of what it means to be human.” But what does this mean, exactly? It means the best essayists harness a very particular and personal truth to speak to larger experience. Amy Butcher shares how a New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed on the startling lack of diversity in our universal emoji set (while male emojis engaged in work and industry, female avatars had their nails painted, received haircuts, or enjoyed flamenco dancing) inspired Google technicians and international change.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously praised the ability to hold in mind two opposing ideas (without cracking up). He could have been talking about stories — they do it all the time. The opposition of ideas can be obvious, such as when good is battling evil, or Goofus is slacking, while Gallant does the chores. In this Eleventh Hour, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of some of the other, more subtle ways that stories hold the line between conflicting viewpoints, and talk as well about how such tensions might shape the end of a story.

We often think of writing as something we’ll really get to do later, when life slows down and we have more time to devote to it. Writing retreats, those programs or places that offer endless space to write and think, couldn’t be nicer. But we don’t have to wait for an official writing retreat to make a peaceful opening for writing in our daily lives. Not only that, we can use writing itself as a way to slow down and become more aware, so that our daily lives can become less hurried and cramped and more open and spacious. Mary Allen will share what she’s learned about creating everyday writing retreats as well as using writing to make the most of every vacation, retreat, and ordinary moment.

This lecture will consider what is at the heart of critique and discuss the relationship between the workshop and places of worship, confessional boxes, crying rooms, hospitals, wombs, therapist offices, museums, and trash cans. When the writer brings her stories and poems into workshop, should she disappear? Replace her body with the page? And why do we bring our poems and stories into workshop anyway? To air them out? To rescue and repair? To heal them from our loneliness? What are we after and what are we given back? Sabrina Orah Mark will share her experiences with the traditional academic workshop, and the workshop she leads out of her garage.

In this Eleventh Hour, poet Michael Morse will discuss how a work of writing can inhabit its contemporary situation by addressing a distant practitioner or piece—as an inspiration, a model, or even a foil. We’ll look at and discuss some model poems and engage in an invigorating circuit of generative exercises suitable for writers of any genre.

Readers and writers often refer to novels in a binary way. They think of them as being either commercial (popular) or literary (artful). It’s a false dichotomy that sets you up to feel defensive, no matter what you write. It fails to recognize the extreme (and exciting) diversity in contemporary writing. And it underestimates readers. Quality of writing and quality of story make magic when they are the right mix at the right time, but quality is as hard to pin down as beauty or talent. Wherever your tastes and talents are on the continuum, from bestselling romance to winners of Le Prix Goncourt, there’s something to be learned at every interval, from Elmore Leonard to Paul Auster, from Shades of Gray to The Underground Railroad.

If sex scenes are so hard to write, as everyone seems to agree they are, why do writers keep bothering with them? In this session, Garth Greenwell will consider some of the things sex scenes can do in fiction, the uniquely powerful tools they offer for exploring the inner and exterior lives of characters. We’ll discuss passages from Flaubert, Lawrence, Acker, and Mary McCarthy.

A novelist has it easy—his characters, sprung from imagination, don’t talk back when they are not happy with the way they’re depicted on the page. But what if your character is your ex-husband, your twin brother, your mother? Are familial loyalty and literary integrity necessarily at odds?

How to Write the Ten-Minute Play: Kelly Dwyer

Where Experience Starts: The Image: Juliet Patterson

Nerve: Some Kinds of Courage Necessary for Writing: Lon Otto

Same Content / Different Form: Jim Heynen