Janet Desaulniers: “You Realize You’ve Been Doing This Thing All Wrong, Right?”

Through the months of June and July, the Writing University website will podcast audio recordings of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival "Elevenses". In these hour-long presentations, writers associated with the Summer Writing Festival will discuss a variety of topics related to the writing process.

In this first podcast of the series, titled, "You Realize You've Been Doing This Thing All Wrong, Right?" Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Janet Desaulniers shares her thoughts on the creative writing workshop, the method by which many writing classes are taught. She shares her strategy for combating writer's block: by writing down "anything that appeals to [you]," or "anything that surprises you about life," writers can generate a lot of rich, raw material to develop and craft into a more finished work.

Listen: Janet Desaulniers at the Summer Writing Festival, 6/11/07

Caryl Pagel introduces Janet Desaulniers' presentation.

Janet Desaulniers’ story collection, What You’ve Been Missing, won the 2004 John Simmons Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Other Voices, and Ploughshares, among other publications; been widely anthologized, including in the Pushcart Prize series; and awarded fellowships from the NEA, the Michener-Copernicus Society, and the Illinois Arts Council. She teaches in the M.F.A. in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is an Associate Professor.

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June 13, 2007
Fiction | Podcasts | Summer Writing Festival | Teaching & Learning

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