The Writing University Podcast
The Writing University podcast features recordings of illuminative craft talks from the renowned writers, novelists, poets, and essayists who present at the Eleventh Hour Lecture Series during the University of Iowa's Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
- Update frequency
- every 5 days
- Average duration
- 48 minutes
- Episodes
- 128
- Years Active
- 2007 - 2023
Episode 68: Mary Allen—Edit Like a Zen Master
Writing is neither good nor bad; it’s only finished or unfinished. It’s in the finishing that it becomes fully realized. It may seem to take a different set of skills—even using a different part of…
01:00:00 |
Wed 08 Jul 2015
Episode 67: Margaret Patton Chapman—The Craft of Enchantment: What Fairy Tales Can Teach Us about Writing
Good stories are often referred to as spellbinding. Of course they are not witchcraft, but the deft hand of the writer, who concocts a magical combination of the familiar and the unknown, of surpris…
01:00:00 |
Tue 07 Jul 2015
Episode 66: Juliet Patterson—Alternative Fuel Sources: Powering the Non-narrative Essay
When story is not the main concern, what keeps us reading? How can voice, structure, or research provide a pressurizing frame—and a pleasing shape—for nonfiction material? We will explore these quest…
01:00:00 |
Thu 18 Jun 2015
Episode 65: Michael Morse—Metaphor as Building Block: Idea to Image and Image to Idea
In this Eleventh Hour, poet Michael Morse will explore how ideas and images work off of and with each other. We’ll consider some poems that use striking examples of imagery, and then we’ll play with …
01:00:00 |
Tue 16 Jun 2015
Episode 64: “Please, Just Don’t Call it “Journaling”: Writing for Self Versus for Others”
There’s often a crucial distinction between our whole life experience and the narrower story, or stories, that we create from it. In this Eleventh Hour, Sarah Saffian—a memoirist, teacher, and mental…
01:00:00 |
Mon 15 Jun 2015
Episode 63: Lon Otto—When Bad Bets Pay Off
When we’re learning to write (the learning that takes a lifetime), it’s smart to focus on high-percentage moves, choices most likely to result in writing that will engage, convince, and move the read…
01:00:00 |
Thu 11 Jun 2015
Episode 62: Susan Taylor Chehak — Self-Publishing and the Small Press
Susan Taylor Chehak, an ardent and successful writer, blogger, and self-publisher, will discuss the who, what, why, where, when and how of doing it yourself. Susan is the driving force behind Forever…
01:00:00 |
Wed 10 Jun 2015
Episode 61: Elizabeth Robinson -- You Can Start a Press/Publication
One of the best ways to participate in, and help define, contemporary literature is to start your own press or literary publication. This may sound intimidating, but you might be surprised to find th…
00:16:49 |
Thu 24 Jul 2014
Episode 60: Juliet Patterson -- How Poets See the World: The Art of Description
“It sounds like a simple thing say what you see,” Mark Doty has written. “But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning." In t…
00:55:42 |
Wed 23 Jul 2014
Episode 59: Kelly Dwyer -- Better Talky Talky: The Art and Craft of Strong Dialogue
Many book editors say that they read the first paragraph of a manuscript, and if they like it, they skip ahead to read some dialogue. If the dialogue is strong, they go back to page one and keep read…
00:50:39 |
Tue 22 Jul 2014
Episode 58: Sarah Saffian -- The Politics of Writing About Loved Ones
A novelist has it easy—his characters, sprung from his imagination, don’t talk back when they’re not happy with the way they’re depicted on the page. But what if your character is your ex-husband, yo…
00:55:29 |
Mon 21 Jul 2014
Episode 57: Joyelle McSweeney—Contemporary Gothic(s)
In an age of technophilic positivism typified by the TED-talk, the smartphone, and the MOOC, why do we still need a shadowy, cobwebby, grave-y form like the Gothic? What darker truths about contempor…
00:47:40 |
Thu 17 Jul 2014
Episode 56: Éireann Lorsung -- ‘Productivity’ and ‘Failure’ for Writers
Over and over I hear my students, my peers, and my own interior voice talk about failure as writers. Often this is linked to an idea of ‘productivity’, and in particular to a perception of others as …
00:38:22 |
Wed 16 Jul 2014
Episode 55: Hope Edelman -- The Story Behind Your Story
When we write narrative, both sides of our brains ideally work together: the left brain controls linear thinking, logic, and language skills, and the right brain creates context and inserts emotion. …
00:55:42 |
Thu 10 Jul 2014
Episode 54: Kate Aspengren -- Who Are These People and Who Invited Them?
Sometimes when we look at what we’ve written we realize we’ve created characters who are basically all some version of ourselves. It’s like multiple clones of the writer only with different haircuts.…
00:12:04 |
Wed 09 Jul 2014
Episode 53: Nancy K. Barry -- The Sixth “W” in Nonfiction Writing and Research
From its beginning in the 1960s, literary journalism and its writers typically acknowledged their contextual debt to the traditional questions journalists ask about the five “W's”—the who, what, wher…
00:16:14 |
Tue 08 Jul 2014
Episode 52: Carolyn Lieberg -- Write What You Know: The Scary Truism That Haunts Writers
What you know is the here and now and past of your own life, your own family, your own travels and some things about your friends. What you don’t know is everything else, which is a lot. What exactly…
00:02:14 |
Mon 07 Jul 2014
Episode 51: Faculty Reading: Sabrina Orah Mark, Michael Martone, Beau O'Reilly, Robin Hemley, Elizabeth McCracken
Sabrina Orah Mark, Michael Martone, Beau O'Reilly, Robin Hemley, Elizabeth McCracken
00:52:02 |
Sat 28 Jun 2014
Episode 50: Mary Allen -- Harnessing Time: The Key to Writing
One of the biggest challenges, and imperatives, of writing is finding the time—making time—to sit down and do it. It’s something like that moment in the movie Field of Dreams, where a mysterious voic…
00:47:50 |
Thu 26 Jun 2014
Episode 49: Talk Pretty, Talk Turkey—Just, You Know, Talk To Me
“Find your voice”—the most natural thing a writer should do, right? Somewhere inside me is my voice! Yet, the search tends to proceed like a grail quest, only trickier, because ‘voice’ pops up everyw…
00:57:46 |
Wed 25 Jun 2014
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