Upcoming Readings
- 5/23 Shelter House readin...
- 5/28 Benjamin Percy and E...
- 6/01 Alex Ko reading 6/1/...
- 6/04 Angela Onwauchi-Will...
- 6/10 Ben Lytal reading 6/...
- 6/11 B.K. Loren reading 6...
- 6/12 Rob Cline reading 6/...
Writing University Podcast
June 21, 2012
The Three Poisons is a simple and elegant Tibetan Buddhist teaching that identifies three foundational emotions that underlie all others—passion, aggression, and ignorance—much the way the three primary colors combine to make all others. For writers, awareness of the three poisons, which point to the ultimate equality and emptiness of all emotions, can be as profoundly beneficial as Keats’s idea...
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June 20, 2012
In this Eleventh Hour, Karen Bender will address a strategy that she found helpful while writing her first novel—finding a short excerpt within it and polishing it to send out. She will discuss the differences between a story and a novel, what to look for in your novel when trying to shape a good excerpt or story, and how to use the story form to help you revise a nebulous, inchoate novel.
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June 19, 2012
Suddenly it’s in vogue, the sentence. Books and NYT blogs: Attend, oh ye proseurs*, to the way the words lie on the page. There’s good reason to read closely for style and meaning, for efficacy and elegance. There’s good reason to think why good ones are, and bad ones aren’t—well, good. And there’s reason maybe most of all to rise to the challenge: Make your prose better, a line at a time. An...
June 18, 2012
What is flash fiction? You’ve read it, perhaps even written it in class: super-short stories, anywhere from a paragraph to a couple of pages in length, sometimes zeroing in on a single moment of experience, sometimes trying to tell a whole life story in a handful of lines. In recent years, flash fiction has moved from the margins to the center, grabbing attention at literary magazines and...
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June 14, 2012
Creative nonfiction is an art of selection, omission, and juxtaposition. Decisions, decisions, decisions… Not only what to leave in and what to take out, but also how to artfully arrange the parts. When just the right elements are juxtaposed, a spark flies up from the space between. In this Eleventh Hour, Carol Spindel will lead a workshop on how to write a personal essay that derives narrative...
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June 12, 2012
In this panel discussion Pettit, Leidner, McDonnell, and Stone will discuss their recent poetry, fiction, and comic publications in conjunction with specific and intimate outside influences, inspirations, imitations, and inquiries. They will present examples of the ideas, authors, forms, and practices which helped them generate their own most recent work, as well as discuss how writers might...
June 11, 2012
In this Eleventh Hour, Anjali Sachdeva will discuss the effect that getting out into the world and participating can have on your writing. This type of experiential preparation can take different forms—conducting interviews or on-site research, participating in an activity that one will later write about (or that characters take part in during a pivotal scene), or more meditative forms of writing...
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June 13, 2011
Risk taking, risk evaluation, risk avoidance are all leaned up against when one decides to become a writer and decides how to write what one writes. We hear writers say to one another all the time: how did you get away with that?! Or, I can’t believe you got away with that! We admire how writers “get away” with things in writing. Why is this? What attracts us to this? Obviously, at least partly,...
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August 23, 2010
Through what alchemy do writers take lived life and transform it into art? We all have stories to tell, something from our own life or the life of a loved one, which we believe would make a great short story or novel. All too often, however, when we try to write it down, it’s reduced to an anecdote which lies there on the page, lifeless as an empty glass. In this Elevenses, using failed and...
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June 29, 2010
No one writes who hasn't read, and we all know, at least vaguely, that reading as a writer is a distinctive as well as essential part of the writing life. This Elevenses tries to sort out some of the very different, even contradictory things that are involved in reading as a writer.
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