The Writing University Podcast

Writing is neither good nor bad; it’s only finished or unfinished. It’s in the finishing that it becomes fully realized.

Drawing from the ideas of Kate Bernheimer and Bruno Bettelheim, among others, we’ll investigate the history of fairy tales, their story structures, the ways in which they’re rooted in a knowable world, and the elements that give them a sense of urgency, surprise, and wonder.

When story is not the main concern, what keeps us reading?

Michael Morse explores how ideas and images work off of and with each other.

There’s often a crucial distinction between our whole life experience and the narrower story, or stories, that we create from it.

It’s worth remembering, however, that sometimes things normally worth avoiding perversely succeed.

Susan Taylor Chehak will discusses the who, what, why, where, when and how of doing it yourself.

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 that such projects need not be prohibitively expensive or overwhelmingly difficult. This talk will discuss a variety of media (print and electronic) and a variety of projects (magazine, blog-zine, chapbook press, and full-length book publications) and how to make your project sustainable, enjoyable, and meaningful.

“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 this hour, we’ll take refuge in the sensory experience found in some contemporary poets, as a way of thinking about a number of questions: How does description contain or convey meaning? What do we do when we describe something? Reproduce, account for, portray, trace, parcel out? How does one take the measure of the external world and what can it mean for our writing?

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 reading. If the dialogue is weak, the editor sets down the manuscript, and the chances for publication (with that particular house, anyway) end there. Knowing how to write good dialogue, then, is crucial to publication—and readership. In this hour, we’ll explore what makes strong dialogue. Bring your laptops or pencils and notebooks with you, as Kelly will put you to work in responding to an exercise. (Sharing optional.)

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, your twin brother, your mother? Are familial loyalty and literary integrity necessarily at odds? How can we most effectively navigate this touchy terrain, to maintain our real-life relationships without compromising the stories we need to tell? In this lecture/ discussion, we’ll grapple with such prickly issues as: the possibility of multiple “truths”; altering identifying characteristics; inviting loved ones into your writing process (or not); the pros and cons of allowing relatives to read your manuscript, and how much to revise per their comments, if at all; determining if what could hurt others truly advances the story. Whether you’re in the midst of a memoir project or are just contemplating one and scared off by this very conflict, let’s explore forms of expression that we can stand behind both as authors and

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 contemporary life—economic, environmental, political, bodily—can the Gothic mode bring up to the surface? This talk will look at the way authors from around the globe—Korea, Mexico, Chile, Sweden, and the US—make use of Gothic forms and tropes to make literary conventions split apart like the House of Usher and bring other bodies, truths and vistas rushing into view.

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 ‘more productive’. As publication online increases the speed at which writing can appear in public, the distance between writing as a process and writing as a product closes. Consequently, the concept of productivity is measured more and more in terms of visible, finished objects, muddling the relation of publication to the act/process of writing. I’ll question the usefulness of these ideas—failure and productivity—for writing, and suggest ways of reframing our writing processes to accommodate work that ‘fails’ or is not visibly ‘productive’. In addition to talking about how what seems like ‘failure’ is an integral part of making writing that’s worthwhile, I’ll offer strategies and concepts—the multiple, the telescope—that help me keep writing despite unhappiness with my work or the feeling that others are ‘better

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. This Eleventh Hour Lecture will emphasize the importance of using both sides of the brain when writing fiction and nonfiction, to push beyond an episodic recounting of events into territory that reveals your story's deeper truths. Nonfiction author Hope Edelman will give you with tips for identifying universal themes and archetypes in your stories, and methods for articulating them to readers.

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. Or we find that we have a group of wonderful, quirky characters but that our protagonist is dry and uninteresting, exactly the kind of person you’d dread getting stuck next to at a dinner party. In this session we’ll talk about some of the problems inherent in constructing character and some of the strategies that are useful in crafting characters who are unique and real and three-dimensional.

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, where, when and why that lie at the heart of any good reportage. The difference for creative nonfiction writers lies in their ability to create a narrative arc that describes how those 5 “W’s” come into focus, which means that virtually any memoir or nonfiction work becomes a type of quest story. This lecture will describe why and how nonfiction writers should always be on the lookout in the midst of their quest for the mysterious sixth “W”—what it is and why it matters.

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 are we to make of those oft-tossed words: “Write what you know.” They can feel like a stop sign, but let’s look behind them.

Sabrina Orah Mark, Michael Martone, Beau O'Reilly, Robin Hemley, Elizabeth McCracken

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 voice says to Kevin Costner, If you build it they will come. Except that in the case of writing, ‘building it’ means not creating a ballpark to attract ghostly baseball giants, but creating a little window of time in which to write. We can’t make the writing come to us, but if we make a space for it in our day, it will inevitably show up. And if we don’t make space for it, writing definitely won’t come. Mary Allen will share her experiences and struggles with finding time to write, and will pass along the workable solutions she’s arrived at over the years.

“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 everywhere on the page, appearing now in the style, now in the sound, now in the stance, now in the details. So, is it the bedrock DNA of great writing, or a will-o-the-wisp? Should we follow the fiction writer Sylvia Watanabe’s advice, “Don’t try to find your voice; write a story”? In this Eleventh Hour session we’ll try to un-confuse an elusive all-inclusive concept, and we’ll start by looking at what ‘voice’ means to poets and what it does and doesn’t mean to fiction writers. Bring paper, we’ll be experimenting with a few exercises!