The Writing University Podcast

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 Ghayath Almadhoun, Yehuda Amichai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kenneth Koch, Hayan Charara, Jane Hirshfield, and others. We'll consider how literature can help us make peace, again and again, and what can be made from that.

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 unrealistically idealizing them and thus stripping them of their complex humanity? How do we convey, in the short space of a poem or an essay, how our mother or grandmother or child or spouse was different from anyone else’s? How do we make the work about the person we remember and not primarily about us and our pain—should we even be trying to do so?—etc. In this Eleventh Hour we will consider these and other questions, looking at samples of successful elegies, considering how they succeed, and doing a bit of free-writing towards work of our own. Although the samples we will consider will consist primarily of narrative poems, lessons we can take from them will apply regardless of genre.

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.

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 how to write good dialogue, then, is crucial to publication—and readership (and of course, if anything, is even more crucial in the arts of playwriting and scriptwriting).

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 ways that you, too, can utilize this ancient mindset to heighten the quality of composition in your work.

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 editor of dharma texts—with examples from many genres, and ample space for discussion.

The memory curve, on a most basic level, means the reader’s attention is highest at the beginning, dips in the middle, and goes up again at the end. When putting pen to paper for the first time, most writers don’t think about a reader’s memory curve, nor should they. But when considering structure after the fact, during revision, it is of paramount importance. Structuring a story or a novel has everything to do with managing the retention dip in the middle of the curve. This requires a focus on beginnings, endings and transitions. This lecture will focus primarily on transitions, their power and how they can become intermittent beginnings and endings when used effectively.

“The present moment is all you have,” as author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says, and nowhere is this more the case than in writing. Successful narrative writing allows the reader to virtually experience a series of present moments through the magic of language and imagination. Mary Allen shares what’s she’s learned as a writer and a writing coach about how to create present moments on the page, why it’s important to do so, and what learning how to do so can teach us about living our lives.

No one wants your story, essay, or poem to read like Fast and the Furious 9. But Hollywood formulae reflect a kind of science of narrative satisfaction, which can be transformative for a piece that isn't coming together in precisely the right way. We'll apply a number of hallowed screenwriting maxims to works of nonfiction and fiction, from overall structure down to the level of the scene. This session will give you resources for revising work in any genre.

No one wants your story, essay, or poem to read like Fast and the Furious 9. But Hollywood formulae reflect a kind of science of narrative satisfaction, which can be transformative for a piece that isn't coming together in precisely the right way. We'll apply a number of hallowed screenwriting maxims to works of nonfiction and fiction, from overall structure down to the level of the scene. This session will give you resources for revising work in any genre.

We’re all voyeurs when it comes to the habits and practices of other writers. Do they churn out a certain number of pages each week? Do they have a day job? A cat? A room of their own? What does the desk look like? After peeking into several artists’ practices, we’ll turn to our own—not just with our writing, but our everyday lives: doing the dishes to walking the dog; vegetable gardening to schlepping kids to hockey; playing drums to serving at the church soup kitchen. We will explore the nature of dailiness and how such activities can shape our art. What does it take to create a whole life, one that will nourish us and allow our writing to flow out of it rather than squeeze into it? Come with questions and a niggling sense of possibility.

Poets and songwriters utilize aspects of language that are essential for prose writers to know. Take the slow, repeated vowels and consonants Joyce uses in “The Dead”: “…his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe…” or the hasty sibilance alive in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Oh wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!” Sound and rhythm help create sense and emotion, and by paying close and purposeful attention to the words we use—the beginnings of them, the interior sounds of them, the rhythm of them—we can evoke and ignite those senses and those emotions. In this Eleventh Hour you’ll hear (and practice) how techniques used in the sung and the spoken can help us create magic on the page.

The most intimate, powerful, and fraught relationships in our lives are often with the limited inner circle we call family. For that reason, those relationships often feature heavily in our writing. However, to write about family relationships means putting its players on a public stage, and this can bring a whole set of unique issues, both practical and emotional. In this lecture and discussion, specific difficulties a writer faces in writing about family members will be addressed, including concerns about ethical treatment of your subjects, family responses to publication, the writer’s fear of repercussions, discrepancies in memory, and research challenges.

Transforming life into writing is an individual process, as individual as the art we create. Another way to think about this is how do we understand and explain the relationship of the real or actual, what some people might call, what really happened, to the stories, poems or essays we put on the page. Much of what I have to say will be a practical guide for helping writers access stories from their own lives and the lives of people they know, with pointers on bringing that material into full blossom on the page. In addition, drawing on my experience in writing a forthcoming novel/memoir, I’ll address an issue I know many ISWF students struggle with: should this be fiction or memoir.

Chiaroscuro, in art, is a technique that uses bold contrasts of light and dark in painting to create vivid scenes and evoke emotion. It renders images almost three-dimensional. In writing, the bold use of light and dark has a similar effect. The balance of the serious with the humorous allows readers the chance to enter a story more fully, to laugh and cry, and connect with writing in a way that writing straight serious prose or simply humorous doesn't allow. This Eleventh Hour talk will look at examples from writing and art that perfectly balance the dark with the light to create hilarious and heart-rending work on the page.