Friday, March 13, 2020

The Writing University's Eleventh Hour podcast features recordings of illuminating craft talks from the renown writers, novelists, poets, essayists who present at the Eleventh Hour Lecture Series during the University of Iowa's Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Each week we release a tailored craft talk from the series, focusing on a wide range of topics such as Transforming Life into Writing, Humor Writing, The Music of Language and so many more.


Episode #126: Me, Myself and I - The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction

 

In this episode, Me, Myself and I, author Juliet Patterson explores artistic transformation through reflection. We often think about the tool of reflection in writing as a mode of thought or tone of voice we employ when we ruminate, meditate, contemplate or explain—in short, when we provide what Phillip Gerard calls, “finished thought.”

But we might also think about reflection as a turning, as a sometimes distorting, but transformational power. In this talk, we’ll look briefly at four qualities of reflection that might encourage artistic transformation in our writing and try some short exercises that will give you some practical tools to “think” about yourself differently on the page.

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Listen to the episode here

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This talk was originally given on July 23, 2019 in the Phillips Auditorium on the University of Iowa campus.