During this Elevenses lecture, essayist and nonfiction writer Carl Klaus will present a chapter from his forthcoming book, The Made-Up Self: Impersonations in the Personal Essay. Carl H. Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa’s...
Knowing when and how to revise when we’re stuck is a challenge for any writer. This lecture will describe a revision strategy called “genre swap,” to consider when it might be useful for a writer to completely transform material into a...
This lecture will discuss the difference between a stack a poems and a manuscript. The emphasis will be on helping the listeners think about how to abet single poems enter into the larger conversation that is a book. Among the issues that I will...
Four Chicago prose writers read from their work.
Cris Mazza, the author of a dozen books of fiction, reads from "Trickle Down Timeline." Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary...
The tape begins with a sequence introducing an interview with Russian novelist Viktor Pelevin, which is interrupted by a video montage of Asian book covers and autumn scenery, including landscapes from Hickory Hill Park and Oakland Cemetery. The...
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...
Drawing on his experience writing Child of My Right Hand (2004) and Twelfth and Race (published this March), novelist Eric Goodman discusses the challenges of taking on hot button topics. Why would you do it? What are the pitfalls and pleasures?...
We often speak of a writer’s “voice,” but we do we really mean? What is voice? How do we find it? Keep it and use it? And how does our voice shape or change over the course of a writing life? Part confession, part lecture, part discussion,...
Twenty-three years ago, when she was tired of her acting career in Los Angeles, “California girl” Sands Hall headed to Iowa City for the Writers’ Workshop. Since then, she has had her hands in writing, teaching, directing, editing, acting,...
Prof. E.G. Blackstone of the College of Commerce, giving an illustrated lecture on shorthand, broadcast on W9XK, 1933. Note microphone to pick up sound and photoelectric cells on left to pick up picture.