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Workshop Descriptions & Instructors


Faith Adiele
Mary Allen
Kate Aspengren
Thomas Fox Averill
Nancy Barry
Timothy Bascom
Linda Bendorf
Venise Berry
Bruce Bond

Michael Dennis Browne
Susan Taylor Chehak
John Dalton
Thomas K. Dean
Amber Dermont
Kelly Dwyer
Hope Edelman
Josh Emmons
Katie Ford
Patricia Foster
Laura Fraser
Cecile Goding
Douglas Goetsch
Kevin González
John Griesemer
Sands Hall
Christine Hemp
Jim Heynen
Rick Hillis
Charles Holdefer
Richard Jackson
Cheryl Fusco Johnson
Wayne Johnson
Bret Anthony Johnston
Daniel Khalastchi
Zachary Lazar
Carolyn Lieberg
BK Loren
Fritz Mc Donald
James McKean
Gordon Mennenga
Katherine Min
Sharelle Byars Moranville
Michael Morse
Barbara Robinette Moss
Marc Nieson
Shannon Olson
Lon Otto
Juliet Patterson
Anjali Sachdeva
Sarah Saffian
Sam Samuels
Leslie Schwartz
Sandra Scofield
Mary Kay Shanley
Carol Spindel
Karen Subach
Mary Vermillion
Ashley Warlick
Jan Weissmiller
Bart Yates

Timothy Bascom

The Journey Within: Travel Writing And Transcendence
Weekend Workshop
June 21–22 and July 26-27

An Enormous Eye: Writing The Contemplative Essay
One-Week Workshop
July 6–11

Biography

 

The Journey Within: Travel Writing And Transcendence
Weekend Workshop
June 21–22 and July 26-27

There is a reason many writers go on pilgrimages. Travel dislocates us. It awakens our senses in the process, making us hyper-alert. Disoriented, we start to see anew, whether we have crossed an ocean or driven fifty miles to an unfamiliar town. For a while we may feel “alive” in a spiritual way. Travel takes us somewhere internal, not only external.

After cataloguing our own journeys, both literal and figurative, we will write about several that seem to have emotional or spiritual heat. We will also read from the rich traditions of travel literature that have a spiritual or internal dimension, giving attention to authors as diverse as Peter Matthiessen and Joan Didion, Viktor Frankl and Algazali, Scott Russell Sanders and Jack Kerouac. And in the process, we will look for ways to express transcendent experience without becoming predictable, clichéd, or dogmatic. Bring a work in progress and we will try to start another, looking at both in the workshop setting. 

An Enormous Eye: Writing The Contemplative Essay
One-Week Workshop
July 6–11

According to art critic Herbert Read, “True art persists as an object of contemplation.” One of the reasons that it has this capacity to hold our attention—like the note of a tuning fork—is that it has been created out of contemplation. The reflective, or contemplative, essay is characterized by such focused concentration. The author tends to circle a subject, spiraling away and dropping back to describe it from all angles and to plumb it for meaning. Though the writers of such essays may concentrate on a concrete object—a surgeon’s knife, a family photo, a dying moth, a buckeye—the writing almost always transcends that object, reaching toward provocative or universal insight. We will read from a range of essays, looking for useful techniques and searching for our own “objects of contemplation.” Writers of all levels are welcome. Our aim is to generate new material that can be workshopped during our time together, but participants are welcome to bring a work in progress as well.

Biography
Tim Bascom’s memoir—Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia—won the Bakeless Literary Prize and was published by Mariner Books in 2006. An excerpt was selected by Jamaica Kincaid for Best American Travel Writing 2005. Bascom has also published a novel anda critical study of Christianity in U.S. culture. His essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, Image, Modern Bride, and the in-flight magazine of China Airlines. 

 


 

 

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Sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education
Iowa Summer Writing Festival
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Phone 319-335-4160
FAX 319-335-4743
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Last updated on June 27, 2008