The Writing University Podcast

Oct 19 2023 128 ep. 48 mins 7.2k

The Writing University Podcast artwork

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.

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Episode 132: Crafting "Excess" - Darius Stewart

Oct 19 2023 52 mins

For this talk, we - together, you and I, audience and speaker - will explore maximalist writing as an aesthetics of excess that, according to Will Hertel, strives to "submerge readers with informational deluges, utilizing a variety of subject material and literary techniques and genres to maintain attention." However, chief among our discussion will be the question: what if one is

Episode 131: Prepping for Publication: How and Where to Submit Your Manuscripts - Kelly Dwyer

Sep 11 2023 48 mins

You've written and revised a novel, memoir, story, flash fiction, or poem, and now you want to submit it for publication. As she navigates the publication of her third novel, Ghost Mother, author Kelly Dwyer will take us through the process. We'll discuss where you might consider sending your shorter works and how to send a novel or memoir to an agent. Kelly will provide tips on ho

Episode 130: Writing into (and out of) Trope, Cliche, and Abstraction - Anna Bruno

Jul 10 2023 43 mins

To borrow a cliche, let's go down the rabbit hole. But on the way down, let's observe the dirt, the worms, the twists, the darkness, the sacred and the profane. For a writing project, whether a short story or a novel, trope can be an entry point. Think: a locked room mystery, dark academia, a midlife crisis. Similarly, on the sentence level, cliche can be relatable and point the wr

Episode 129: Refine Your Writing With Attention to Style - Sandra Scofield

Feb 21 2020 45 mins

However creative and brilliant you are, your work is evaluated (consciously or not) for its style. We write in different styles, but all writing needs correct grammar and appropriate punctuation. Good writing is characterized by the clarity and felicity of sentences. Almost everyone has "tics" that mar style, such as problems with noun/pronoun agreement, clumsy clauses, dangling pa

Episode 128: Poetry and Questions of Peace - Zach Savich

May 14 2020 45 mins

Is peace the absence of conflict or a state that can exist within conflict? How can writing cultivate, reveal, practice, and advance personal and shared forms of peaceable assembly? What's the relationship between peace and protest, politics and private experience? This lecture will consider diverse poems that help us think about these questions, including work by poets such as Gha

Episode 127: Writing the Elegy - Challenges and Approaches - Suzan Aizenberg

Apr 27 2020 47 mins

Most of us who write feel the need to remember our dead in elegies, memoir, or fiction, a task that can be more difficult than we at first expect. Often our first challenge is to speak at all, to find language adequate to our grief. Then come other questions: given the injunction not to “speak ill of the dead,” and our own love for those we’ve lost, how do we avoid unrealisti

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

Mar 13 2020 45 mins

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 fou

Episode 125: Better Talky Talky - The Art and Craft of Strong Dialogue - Kelly Dwyer

Feb 12 2020 47 mins

Many book editors and agents 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 reading. If the dialogue is weak, the editor or agent sets down the manuscript, and the chances for publication (with that particular house or agency, anyway) end there. Knowing

Episode 124: Notan - How Visual Art Informs Writing - Sandra Scofield

Feb 05 2020 48 mins

As a painter, I am constantly recognizing ideas about composition in art that speak directly to what I do as a writer. One concept that is especially useful is Notan, a Japanese term that means "light-dark balance." We can also think of positive and negative space, or symmetry and asymmetry--all ideas about shapes and patterns that are the foundation of composition. Consider the wa

Episode 123: Writing From the Central Channel - Diana Goetsch

Jan 21 2020 38 mins

The “central channel,” a somatic and energetic space well-known for centuries in contemplative disciplines, is rarely discussed in connection with writing. Understanding the central channel, and how to apply it to writing, can reveal much about us as artists, and it can open up our craft. This will be an informative, and often humorous presentation—from a poet, essayist, and