All new Writing University podcasts are now available from the Iowa Summer Writing Festival's Eleventh Hour lecture series!
These free podcasts offer highly-informative and inspirational hour-long presentations broaching issues of special interest to writers, including aspects of craft, process, the writing life, and publishing.
Starting this week, we will be posting all new podcasts as they happen. Below is just the start of many to come, available to listeners for free! Find the full listing on our Podcast Directory page.
New podcasts posted this week:
Tuesday, June 19th
Writer as Witness
Katie Ford
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In literary language, a “writer of witness” writes under extremity created by historical forces with no ready option of escape. Imprisonment, systemic poverty, domestic violence, refugee displacement, and racial discrimination are some examples of such conditions. Katie Ford takes us through such writings—primarily poems—in order to discuss how extremity leaves what Carolyn Forché calls its “impress” upon the imagination. How does such pressure and force shape diction, figuration, lyricism, and form? We will also discuss the ethics and practice of such writing.
Thursday, June 21st
The Small [And Pixelated] Made Large: From Grievance To Groundbreaking Change
Amy Butcher
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This lecture will consider the act of naming. How do we choose the names we give to the characters and figures in our stories and poems? How does a name give a character charge, or mark it, or erase it, or illuminate it? How can a name be used as a veil or a cape? An echo or a halo? What are the joys and pitfalls of using the names of the living and the dead inside acts of the imagination?
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